Worst installation instructions ever

mlcarson · Post by **mlcarson** » Wed May 18, 2005 7:20 pm

Forgive the rant but I'm getting very frustrated trying to install Cacti with a 1 page guide reference which puts more emphasis on how to extract a tar file and to use the chown command than the Apache configuration.

My Apache webserver is functional and is pointing at the default location of:
/srv/www/htdocs

My RPM put the cacti files at:
/usr/share/cacti

If I put a symbolic link called cacti in the /srv/www/htdocs directory pointing to /usr/share/cacti, I expected that would allow me to use the url:
http://my-server/cacti
If I do this, I get Access Forbidden -- error 403 messages.
Permissions on directories and files are generally 644 and owned by root thus read permissions are there.

PHP4 is in the modules section of Apache.

This is a Suse 9.x Linux system with Cact 0.8.6c.

I've installed Cricket on both Windows and Redhat Linux and haven't had nearly as much difficulty as just getting the basic install of Cacti done.

The original Suse RPM Cacti 0.8.5a package didn't even have the poller.php portion of the installation so I had to download the 0.8.6c package to just get something which appeared complete.

I'm committed to upgrading my Cricket system to Cacti but I'm off to a rocky start. Is there a better guide to getting the basic packages installed?

Post by **TheWitness** » Wed May 18, 2005 7:57 pm

I think you are confused. Poller.php was not introduced until 0.8.6. Sorry

Otherwise, once you get Cacti running (make sure you run backups), you will be very satisfied.

TheWitness

mgb · Post by **mgb** » Thu May 19, 2005 2:09 am

I must agree with TheWitness. I always thought installing cacti was a breeze and I have installed it on more than 10 different systems. Although my installations have always been on linux I believe installation on windows should be possible without any problem.

You would have made it yourself a lot easier when you installed cacti in the same directory as your apache root.

The only problem I had ever with cacti was that when installing the RPM the crontab entry was already in place. Unnoticed I installed a second one for another user. Running the poller process twice gave me some gaps in the graphs.

I think it´s by far the best graphing program and I have tested a lot of them. Commercial and open source. Also the community is very active which is very important for open source software.

Michael

mlcarson · Post by **mlcarson** » Mon May 23, 2005 5:10 pm

My installation is on Linux -- Suse 9.2 Linux. The YAST and RPM installation put Cacti in the /usr/share/cacti directory. Nowhere in the installation instructions does it say to copy the files elsewhere. Why wouldn't the default installation point be correct? Where does it say in the installation instructions to change it? My point was that the instructions are very lacking concerning the installation of cacti.

These are just a couple of questions that should be in the documentation.

1. What changes have to be made to a default Apache installation to support cacti? Where are they documented?

2. What directory should cacti be installed to if the directories in the RPM are not correct? Why isn't the default location correct?

3. What permissions are required on the Cacti files?

The documentation I used was probably the latest from the website -- coworker downloaded them and printed them out. It referenced poller.php which wasn't present in the default Suse installation. Downloaded the latest from Suse and it was there. This is version 0.8.6c.

Eliminating the symbolic link to the default cacti installation eliminated the permission issue I was experiencing but simply copying the files to the webserver location broke other things which I haven't delved into yet.

So, sorry this installation is far from "a breeze" -- one of the worst I've seen so far. And I haven't even got to the configuration of it yet... I had a Windows installation going for a while (which was also bad) but at least it got a lot further than this -- which surprises me since I thought that Linux would be the "native" environment.

Bottomline, the documenation needs to be a lot better regarding installation. Come on, when there are only 8 steps and 4 of them are for things like tar, chown, crontab, and pointing your web browser -- there's need-to-know information missing. The same information contained in the Windows installation instructions should also be contained for the Unix installation but isn't for some reason.

Now, off to find out what has to be changed to move the installation point to /srv/www/htdoc/cacti or to find an alternative.

Post by **TheWitness** » Mon May 23, 2005 5:38 pm

I think that the installation of Cacti assumes that you have familiarity with Apache and/or other web servers as applicable to leap over these hurdles.

To be completely honest, PHP and apache have changed from version to version so much, it would be very difficult to write an exactly correct installation manual.

Sorry,

TheWitness

achrich · Post by **achrich** » Tue May 24, 2005 8:29 am

Have to Agree.

I`ve installed cacti on several systems without any major problems ( always issues with PHP & Apache but thats outside the scope of this product ).

Put the effort in and you get a lot out !!

jimmygift · Post by **jimmygift** » Tue May 24, 2005 3:15 pm

Hi

regarding that specific issue with Apache, please be sure to add 'index.php' to your DirectoryIndex line on the Apache config file httpd.conf

It should look like this:

Code: Select all

DirectoryIndex index.html index.html.var index.php

[/color]

Restart the apache process afterwards.

If it still doesn´t work place the cacti files directly under the apache root, no symlink, and you should at least see the cacti setup page if the MySQL database setup is right.

Regards.

mlcarson · Post by **mlcarson** » Tue May 24, 2005 7:38 pm

Most frustrating install ever....

It's been days now and I still can't get a basic web page to come up for Cacti. I primarily blame the Apache/PHP configuration and the lack of any documentation from the Cacti manual on the subject. At the very least it should state what needs to be done on that side and refer people to documentation on the subject of how to do it.

Stuff done so far:

1. Modification of default-server.conf file
a. added alias entry for /cacti for /usr/share/cacti since this is the directory that the RPM's install Cacti to.
b. added directory entry for /usr/share/cacti
2. Modified httpd.conf file
a. added index.php file to the DirectoryIndex
3. Installed php4-session 4.3.8
a. yast -i php4-session
b. Instructions didn't say this was needed but it obviously is.

The result:
Firefox will show absolutely nothing with:
http://server/cacti/index.php
or
http://server/cacti/

Internet Explorer shows:
"The page cannot be displayed"
Cannot find server or DNS error.
on both entries.

If I put an HTML file in the directory such as index.html:
http://server/cacti/index.html
The above link will display it.

So, what voodoo has to be done now to just get a valid installation? And why is it so hard to get a decent write up on these type of things.

Post by **TheWitness** » Tue May 24, 2005 8:30 pm

Here is my Httpd.conf file. This is Windows of course. I am a bit odd in that I run on port 81 as my IDE uses port 80 to check syntax.

TheWitness

mgb · Post by **mgb** » Wed May 25, 2005 2:24 am

You might try to create a file called phptest.php inside your /srv/www/htdocs directory and put the following text inside that file.

<?php

// Show all information, defaults to INFO_ALL
phpinfo();

// Show just the module information.
// phpinfo(8) yields identical results.
phpinfo(INFO_MODULES);

?>

call this file and you should see a lot of information regarding php.

Also, It's no problem to just move cacti to the right sport instead of creating a symbolic link. All references inside cacti are relativ.

Michael

achrich · Post by **achrich** » Wed May 25, 2005 3:10 am

I`ve used 9.2 and never had any issues...although i`ve always used the cacit installation from this website rather then the RPM.

Are you using Apache2-mod_php4 ?

If you are using the older one it doesn`t work....

achrich · Post by **achrich** » Wed May 25, 2005 3:20 am

Forgot to mention I`ve always ran cacti from

/srv/www/htdocs/cacti

As long as your running the correct PHP modules and have the directory index configured as mentioned above.

another things to check is /etc/apace2/syscondfig.d/loadmodules.conf - ensure PHP is loading.

dbaldwin · Post by **dbaldwin** » Wed May 25, 2005 7:41 am

Am I correct in assuming you downloaded the source and compiled it versus downloading one of the RPMs?? I am also fairly new to Linux and am running SUSE 9.2.

egarnel · Post by **egarnel** » Wed May 25, 2005 8:19 am

couldn't resist

http://us.ent4.yimg.com/tv.yahoo.com/im ... icbook.jpg

Post by **rony** » Wed May 25, 2005 8:26 am

I was waiting for that....

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