Cactiusers.org

Today I present to you the official release of CactiEZ. The CD weighs in at 355 MB in size, and currently contains only 305 packages. It auto installs CentOS 4.3, Cacti, Cactid, Ntop, Netflow, and a whole slew of other useful items (see the Documentation for more info).

Here are the changes since Beta 4
Some Documentation

Introduction
Login Information
Tips and Tricks

Download Location

CactiEZ CD v0.1 - MD5
Upgrade Script (to upgrade from the Beta 4 Release)

I would like to thank everyone that has tested and worked with the recent Beta releases, without you all, this CD would never have made it to where it is today.

Jimmy,

First - EXCELLENT work on the CactEZ!!!

I was hoping I could possibly have my company sponsor some work to get folded into the Cacti / CactiEZ project? There are two things that I need, but dont know how to do.

1) I need a way to get the syslog (db, file, whatever) from the Cacti to a centralized server.

2) I need all transmissions (FTPs of graphs, syslog, etc) to be transmitted via a secure tunnel.

I plan to deploy Cacti to monitor VOIP phone systems for health checking. The architecture is to have a CactiEZ installation at each customer site, then they would transmit their graphs to the central FTP server, in directory for each customer. So far, I'm ok. When I'm checking up on a customer, I can go to the directory and look at the graphs. The concept is, that even if the customer's network goes down, I would still have the graphs (and hopefully syslog) of the last 5 min sample window. But customers don't want their data sent in the clear, so I was thinking an SSL tunnel to an OpenSSL server at the head end.


As for syslog, I have no idea how to do this. Maybe a "redirector" that sould copy the syslog message into a flat file that collects all syslog updates from the last transmission???? Maybe we just zip and copy of the RRD or MySQL? Maybe a automatic DB sync???

Perhaps this could even lead to a Cacti Server project? A central location to consolidate the reporting of several Cacti deployments? I'm sure that there are others who are managing more than one Cacti instance. Thoughts, comments?

Thanks,
David

BTW, my home email is davidlott@comcast.net if that would be easier channel to communicate. I do have a lab of 3 low end PCs that I can play with and do some testing.

awesome!

Kind regards
Alex

what is it, rootkit:

cacti 2006-05-19 23:27:10 ntpd[1977]: sendto(62.173.184.58): Network is unreachable err

cacti 2006-05-19 23:27:03 ntpd[1977]: sendto(84.16.227.199): Network is unreachable err

cacti 2006-05-19 23:26:11 ntpd[1977]: sendto(81.169.139.140): Network is unreachable err

cacti 2006-05-19 23:10:03 ntpd[1977]: sendto(62.173.184.58): Network is unreachable err

cacti 2006-05-19 23:09:56 ntpd[1977]: sendto(84.16.227.199): Network is unreachable err

cacti 2006-05-19 23:09:05 ntpd[1977]: sendto(81.169.139.140): Network is unreachable

I didn't konfigure anything, it's clean install. Why my host try to connect to above sites ?

You should first look at the process, in this instance its ntpd which you get from this line ntpd[1977] (hint: 1977 is the process ID).

Take ntpd and throw it in google. You will see that it is the daemon for the Network Time Protocol. It is trying to access a time server to keep your server's time synchronized with the atomic clock. It uses a round robin that resides at 0.pool.ntp.org which is why it different addresses (try pinging that address and you will see).

If you don't wish to have your clock updated, just disable and stop the service

Currently I am looking for some input.

Netflow is currently logging to a database inorder to allow queries to be ran against it. I am thinking of removing the database logging, and instead install Flow Viewer to run queries against the flow files themselves.

http://ensight.eos.nasa.gov/FlowViewer/

This is slightly faster than querying a huge MySQL database. And makes it easy to find the info you need through an interface.

If there are no objections, then this will be released in the next version.

thx for answer, i didn't see in syslog number of port, so I didn't know what it was; i'll turn off ntpd

Hello,

I just installed the 0.1 CD in VMWARE. I assigned the server s static IP and the server can ping itself, but nothing else on the network. Any ideas oon where to look?

Thank you,

Brian

A few steps to try, I assume you restarted the networking service after setting up the static. Also, in VMWare, did you assign the nic to the external network or to one of VMWare's internal networks. Can you ping the default gateway? Can you post the output of this command
and this command

This shouldn't be hard to track down once we get a little info.

Well, I tried it at home just for giggles...

and it worked fine. I am able to access the cacti page as well as Webmin.

I am not sure what the difference, but I will try again at work tomorrow. I had checked both ifconfig and route and all seemed fine, but I will copy for posterity and post the results tomorrow.

Thanks for the help!

Brian

It was a silly mistake on my part. It took me this long to realize I was indeed bridging to the wrong interface and network.

Thanks for the pointers and the install looks great!

Brian

Nice work Jimmy! We already have a couple of Cacti installs, but I have customers who like ours and want the same for their internal networks. This is perfect for them.

The cacti poller template is a neat thing too - haven't seen that before.

Do you happen to know if all the plugins installed have a setup_tables()? I'm just thinking that if we wanted to update our main Cacti server (it's running RH9 at the moment), could we use a CactiEZ install and then dump our database/rras over the top? I know that some of the plugins didn't/don't auto-create their database changes...

My only real criticism would be that it'd be nice if the Webmin config was tweaked to reflect what's actually installed. Webmin looks a bit overwhelming until you realise that you don't actually have a CVS server, and QMail server etc etc... It makes the whole thing seem a little less 'EZ' than it really is.

I think this CD will turn a lot more people onto Cacti, and that can only be good.

Why cant I download the file. The transfer just doesn't start :-(

maximum server connection reached?

The easiest way to update, is just to use phpmyadmin to export the database, and be sure to check the "drop if exists" option. Then just import over the top of the current database. This will cause it to not drop all tables, just the ones that existed before, which means most of the plugin tables will be intact. Then just run the Cacti update (should pop up automatically) to update Cacti's database to the newest (when I did it, I went from C to H). Copying over the RRDs will most likely work for you, if not, there are ways to export/import with rrdtool.

I've actually used webmin (besides browing through it), I just installed the default install, since a few users requested it. Have any pointers on where the configuration/database files are stored, so that I can automate it?

Works perfectly for me... anyone else having issues?