Old Ubuntu 10.04 and Cacti 0.8.8c Upgrade Path options

[TwistedTriangle]

Hello,

I am seeking some advice and possible assistance to upgrade a very much used Cacti server.

This server was built years ago and is very old but has been running well and is relied upon daily.

I didn't build this server and whilst familiar with linux and using mrtg many years ago myself I am not familiar with Cacti and have been going on a learning journey to upgrade the Operating System and the Cacti software.

So Far I have the following information:

Version 0.8.8c
Poller type: SPINE 0.8.8c Copyright 2002-2014 by The Cacti Group
Running on: Linux ubuntu 2.6.32-72-generic-pae #139-Ubuntu SMP Wed Jan 14 21:35:19 UTC 2015 i686

Cacti
Version: 0.8.8c

Plugin Architecture
Version: 3.1

Network Tools
Directory: tools
Version: 0.3
Author: Jimmy Conner
Home Page: http://cactiusers.org

Update Checker
Directory: update
Version: 0.4
Author: Jimmy Conner
Home Page: http://cactiusers.org

PHP Network Weathermap
Directory: weathermap
Version: 0.97b - (Update Available!)
Author: Howard Jones
Home Page: http://www.network-weathermap.com/

So this tells me that its running on an Ubuntu 10.04 server (desktop?) OS which has long since been deprecated.

Also from what I've learnt today v0.8.8c of the Cacti software is many versions behind the latest 1.1.3x release but from what I also understand the 0.8.8 releases were before the transition to the now used 1.x.x format.

As the PHP Network Weathermap is one of the most used features of this cacti build, i have noted that its currently states 'This version does not yet support Cacti 1.0'

So...

The main task is to upgrade the OS to a modern supportable OS such as Ubuntu LTS 18.04 which I am familiar with, after this look at upgrading Cacti itself if possible.

I've been looking at a few different approaches, upgrades, fresh installs etc but each are hit with problems.

As Ubuntu 10.04 is so old upgrading all the way through to 18.04 might be difficult/not possible?

I'm currently looking at a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 build and manually installing all the required software and Cacti but i get the feeling this will break the first time i run an apt-get upgrade process?

Also I need to work out what and how the data is stored and move it to the new server.

Any assistance or advice would be much appreciated if anyone cares to take some time to reply, I bet im not the only lucky bunny to have inherited this situation before.

Back to googling and trawling forum posts for me, thanks for your time

[netniV]

OK, so here are some downer points on the upgrade.

1. The heavily used Weathermap is still under construction for 1.x compatability. You may get it working (sort of) but it wouldn't be 100% what you have right now. I think core functionality is there but there's still some editing issues

2. Plugins may or may not work with 1.x so check the docs.cacti.net site for a list of known plugins and their compatability

3. Ubuntu 18.04 uses a later PHP and MySQL than is fully supported. They have issues with breaking changes that are fixed in the development code for 1.2 but that has yet to be released so again isn't 100% right now. We are currently discussing the merits of back porting some of the fixes we have made to 1.2 to a 1.1.39 release to correct a number of issues so this point will become corrected one way or another soon.

So with that out of the way, the only other sticking points is that you will have to migrate the database and RRA folders to a new server then install cacti and run through the upgrade process. At that point you should have an upgraded database and things just work but some people have had issues if their graphs do things in a way that 0.8.8 allowed but really shouldn't have. Thus, do run a test upgrade and monitor it for a couple of days.

[TwistedTriangle]

Thanks for your reply netniV, appreciated.

1. The heavily used Weathermap is still under construction for 1.x compatability. You may get it working (sort of) but it wouldn't be 100% what you have right now. I think core functionality is there but there's still some editing issues

Yeah I think this is the show stopper for now, the main use of this Cacti install is the weathermaps and without it being upto spec it might derail the idea

2. Plugins may or may not work with 1.x so check the docs.cacti.net site for a list of known plugins and their compatability

Roger, I read about and discovered the compatability matrix and have been checking this too, thanks again.

3. Ubuntu 18.04 uses a later PHP and MySQL than is fully supported. They have issues with breaking changes that are fixed in the development code for 1.2 but that has yet to be released so again isn't 100% right now. We are currently discussing the merits of back porting some of the fixes we have made to 1.2 to a 1.1.39 release to correct a number of issues so this point will become corrected one way or another soon.

So with that out of the way, the only other sticking points is that you will have to migrate the database and RRA folders to a new server then install cacti and run through the upgrade process. At that point you should have an upgraded database and things just work but some people have had issues if their graphs do things in a way that 0.8.8 allowed but really shouldn't have. Thus, do run a test upgrade and monitor it for a couple of days.

Fair enough, 18.04 might be too new and introduce compatibility issues now as you say, I'll look into this and what the latest LTS release that has the supported versions of PHP/MySQL, good call.

I found some very good posts in the forum yesterday about how to tar up and migrate the relevant data directories so I think that will be ok.

How would you suggest handling the software installs? I was really hoping to stick with the apt-get packages and updates rather than mucking about with individual packages and installs so that for the future upgrades/migrations might be less messy. Part of the core aim of this work was to avoid the situation where the box has been built and let sit for many years without updates so anything I can do to make it easier for myself (or others) in future the better and any advice appreciated.

[mmccaugh]

Just my two cents as I was (am) in this exact same position myself.

My approach has been to just build new servers to run in parallel so I can test, and validate (LOTS of Templates, and plugins that worked on 0.88 are tagged as not being compatible with 1.x for instance). I've been working through the challenges at the pace my free time allows, but I have left the old instances completely untouched so I'm not under the gun to fix issues as they crop up.

The down side to this approach is I've had to allocate server resources for some extra VM's (These are pretty lightweight instances though so it wasn't too cumbersome), and of course it's a lot more work than a simple upgrade and migration.

The big up side is it's given me SIGNIFICANTLY more time to dig into the new features in 1.x and really make the use out of the new capabilities, as there really is a lot of really cool stuff that's been added!

Things like Templates haven't been too big a deal, I've had to do some manual fixing on my own but this too I see as a positive as it's given me the opportunity to learn more about how this stuff works (Before now I never needed to really make the time, I just loaded templates and for the most part everything worked!).

If you've the time and capacity I'd recommend this approach, but the move to 1.x IMO is well worth it!

[netniV]

Paul Gever's has done some excellent backports for Debian (which apparently may work with Ubuntu) but in general the package versions can be one or two behind just in case there are any major bugs. I think right now Paul's got 1.1.38 on the backports repo.

[TwistedTriangle]

Thank you both for your responses, much appreciated.

One question that come up here in discussion was what if we were to take on board that there's the issues with upgrading Cacti due to plugin compatibility which given the prominence of the Weather map we look at an out of the box option.

What about the possibility of building a brand new OS with the latest supportable Cacti on a new box not in production such as mmccaugh has which we then used to collect the data but we somehow then had the old box feed its data from the new box so that the weather maps and old box are retained for the time being albeit in a more isolated and controlled way? Essentially the new box does the gathering from the devices, the old box takes data from that database.

I can imagine there would be some fancy scripting required for this which is above my skill level for sure but I wonder if this has been attempted before?

[netniV]

The problem you will have with that is that the structure of the databases have changed from a codebase point of view (including some name changes) so you can't point them at one another. The next is that you could potentially share the RRA's but for that to work, the old system must know all the hosts the new one does plus all the data sources. Then you would have to re-create any graphs seen on the new system. Theoretically, I can see it working in my head but my heart feels like there will be an awful lot of work involved and plenty of heartache.

I would be interested if you do see a way of achieving that though.