[HOWTO] RHEL4/Cacti-start to finish install instructions

[stygioster]

I wish all posts were as informative as this. Strait through, no issues other than spare time to surf the Internet.

After wrestling with - not only the Linux, but Cacti installs - I decided to make this my first post to give back to the community.
You will find attached, 2 separate documents detailing the steps necessary for the Redhat and Cacti installations.
As this was my personal install, you may or may not agree with the path/subdirectory decisions - however keep in mind this was posted more as a template to follow rather than a 'Best Practices' document.

Hope this clears up some frustration for current/future Cacti installers...

4/26/2006 - Removed .doc files and reposted as .pdf files as requested...

[JimB]

For anyone who'd rather use Dag's pre-made rpm, its just:

Code: Select all

yum install cacti
mysqladmin -u root create cacti
mysql cacti < /var/www/cacti/cacti.sql

mysql> GRANT ALL ON cacti.* TO 'cactiuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'cactiuser';
mysql> flush privileges;

The rpm takes care of setting up the cactiuser, its cron and the apache config for you. The apache config is restricted to 127.0.0.1 by default so you probably want to open that up.

[flakrat]

The repo that you need to enable is rpmforge

You still need to modify the config.php file to give it the correct database information.

And as the previous poster mentioned, the /etc/httpd/conf.d/cacti.conf file has a line that restricts web access to the localhost:

"allow from 127.0.0.1"

This will need to be opened up to allow your workstation or network.

I've found many guides that get users to this point, but I haven't yet found one that takes you through the creation of graphs for a RHEL / CentOS system. That would be a nice addition to this guide.

[flakrat]

One other thing that got me, after you have everything installed and you login successfully as admin, before you do anything else, click on "Settings" and configure your SNMP settings.

I'm not yet using SNMP v3, but I was forced to set my v3 password. I entered the password that I plan to use in the future.

If you don't enter your SNMP settings prior to creating your first device, you'll get an error stating the passwords do not match when you click to save your new device.

This is a little confusing since there aren't "password" and "confirm password" fields on the device creation form.