Cactiusers.org

We now have a new version of the CactiEZ CD to try out.

You can grab the beta copy here.
Link removed as its outdated

Maybe eventually I will throw up a torrent or something.

New in this version
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Things still in the works
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From the original Forum Topic
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I have recently been playing around with the concept of a Cacti CD. I have created an auto-installing CD based on CentOS 4.3. This CD completely installs and configured the OS, NTop 3.1, Netflow, Webmin, Net-SNMP, RRDTool 1.2, Cacti, CactiD, the Plugin Architecture, several plugins, and everything else that is needed for a fully functional system. Everything is all preconfigured and completely working after initial install. This all requires ZERO input from the user except inserting the CD. This should make it very easy for anyone to test out Cacti.

The disk is a completely remastered CD (from the 4 CD version, not the Server CD) and stripped down to the bare essentials (no GUI). The CD weighs in at roughly 372 Meg, and installed is roughly 800 Megs. At only 305 packages, it still includes a preconfigured firewall (only allowing http, ssh, and remote Syslog and few other items).

1st

I noticed one error message when booting CactiEZ Beta 4 in my VM:

snmpd can't connect to MySQL Server

See attached screenshot.

Cacti ans Syslog-Plugin are working fine

Screenshot:
Why are messages from ntop categorized as "error"?




These problems are mentioned in Log (newest = last):

localhost.localdomain 2006-03-24 12:28:03 om_mysql_write: 64 messages were lost due to lack of connection notice


localhost.localdomain 2006-03-24 12:28:14 ntop[2197]: **WARNING** ASN: Unable to open file 'AS-list.txt' err


localhost.localdomain 2006-03-24 12:28:19 webmin(pam_unix)[2228]: authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty= ruser= rhost= user=root notice


localhost.localdomain 2006-03-24 12:30:00 login(pam_unix)[2257]: authentication failure; logname=LOGIN uid=0 euid=0 tty=tty1 ruser= rhost= user=root notice


//reason could be no internetconnection? unimportant for me
localhost.localdomain 2006-03-24 12:34:34 ntop[2197]: **ERROR** CHKVER: Unable to connect socket: Connection timed out(110) err

When I tried the CD, I got an error at boot. My system would not even recognize the CD. I'm thinking I got a bad download / file transfer. Would you publish an MD5sum?

BTW, I think the concept is a GREAT idea!

Question, why CentOS? I've not heard of them before. I have been using FC4 because of the broad support. Is there any special reason why you chose CentOS?

Ok, I seem to have a clean down load. At least it is booting and installing CentOS.

K3B reports the MD5sum as:
d48e249910c496816f2580de8c695e47

Is it possible to have a tarball version of this to install to an existing CentOS build? (Like Asterisk@Home does)

One good example of when you might wish to do this is with Xen virtual servers.
These don't allow booting off an ISO to install a guest OS, but a base CentOS is easy, which could then be added to with the desired tarball

It would also be useful to those who already had CentOS & wanted a smaller download...

F

You would have to ask the developers of NTop that, since I don't categorize anything myself, that is how it is sent to the syslog daemon.


This is because the MySQL daemon doesn't start until after the syslog daemon. I've seen it (it was in the last version too), I just haven't taken the time to figure out how to start the MySQL daemon sooner. Let me know if you find the answer.


Hum... haven't noticed that error, but it could just be an initialization error. Search for the file and see if it shows up. Ntop usually creates the files it needs, but displays errors incase they were suppose to be there in the first place.


Did you fail to login to webmin and at the console?


Yep, no internet connection, so NTop could not check to see if it was running the latest version, which is isn't, mainly since 3.2 has issues with Netflow.

Could be possible, only issue would be all the dependecies for Ntop and Netflow. For the most part, you could pull the data off the CD, and look at the ks.cfg script for all the command line operations.

I will look into releasing this way also, just may take me a bit to get everything working as smoothly as the CD version.

Fedora Core is basically the test bed for Redhat Enterprise. Which means there is always the possibility that an update will break your system. I know this since several of my production Cacti systems run it, and upgrading them seems to break them every time. I am in the process of upgrading all my systems to CentOS, mainly for its stability.

CentOS is basically Redhat Enterprise without the commercial software, the support, or the Redhat branding. Updates for each version are build from the same sources as the Redhat Enterprise version.

From their site...

I thought CentOS existed to piss off computer illterate city managers in Oklahoma

Can you offer a suggestion on where to configure this is it in the ntop config.

Sorry im a windows users :)

NTop plugin configured within NTop via the Admin menu, then Plugins

F

Thanks enabled the NTOP plugin from the admin/plugin menu. On the Netflow device i have set the local collector UDP Port to 2056. Do i need to set the interface address for the virtual netflow interface? I am seeing lotsa of graphs which show a total of 700-800Gb of data so something working :)

Does the new beta allow for an upgrade from beta3? I would like to retain my data & other tweaks if at all possible

I agree. I would like to be able to upgrade from the previous beta as well. I am not familiar with Linux enough yet to take on the task of doing all that on my own.

I would be happy if ther were a way to move my data over to the new beta4 build easily, if there is no upgrade path. I have spent a fair amount of time getting this to work, and have deployed it to several machines now. I would be happy to know that all that work is not lost every time I have to upgrade.

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