I wanted to do some logging of network interface usage on some of our switches so I thought I'd setup Cacti and give it a try. Why Cacti, well I had used it before (years ago) and thought I'd use it again.
Where did I start? I thought a linux box my be the easiest way to get it going. I also thought if I ran into problems help would be easier to find for a linux box than a Windows box also. So I went to Ubuntu's website and grabbed the latest LTS Server iso (which happens to be 12.04 Precise Pangolin). Then I picked up a flash drive and used unetbootin to load the iso on the drive. Waited for it to finish, then pulled the drive out and attempted to boot the system from the flash drive.
I noticed the boot loader mentioned loading some BSD files which I thought was rather odd, but I went on working on something else and waited for it to finish booting up. I checked the boot screen and it wasn't a Ubuntu install, it was an install screen for an appliance that I had recently updated using that same flash drive. Apparently UNetbootin didn't overwrite the other installer correctly. The plan was to just format the drive and try again. It seems nothing goes as easily as it should. Windows only recognizes the 4gb flash drive as a 28mb drive. Great, the appliance installer must have partitioned the drive and Windows can't read it correctly. So I downloaded BOOTICE from http://bbs.ipauly.com/ to clear off the partitions and reformat the drive.
After doing that I, I then re-ran UNetbootin and loaded the iso back on the drive. Did I mention that nothing seems to go as easy as it should? I picked USB Boot out of the boot menu on the computer and bam, an immediate "Boot Failed" message. Great...what's wrong now? The drive had been a little slow to write to, maybe it had finally died. Being in the computer business it seems there's always another flash drive lying around so I looked until I found a 1gb drive. That doesn't sound like much but it's plenty for a Ubuntu installation.
Third time's the charm, right? Run through UNetbootin to copy the iso to the flash drive, then boot the computer, and finally... a Ubuntu install screen.
This is all pretty basic stuff on the Ubuntu install. I went through and did pick to use the entire drive and install LVM. When it asked about what applications to installed I picked the LAMP option (that's Linux Apache MySQL PHP in case you wondered). There are more guides for installing Ubuntu than you can shake a stick at so I wont cover that here.
After a couple of false starts there I finally got Ubuntu installed on the machine. To get Cacti installed is pretty easy. I did a sudo apt-get install cacti and it installed cacti and all the dependencies and loaded right into the cacti setup.
Setting up cacti is pretty straight forward. Here's a link install-and-configure-cacti-monitoring-tool-in-ubuntu-9-10-karmic-server.html to a guide that's complete with screenshots. This one's pretty close to what I saw. The only difference I found is that the RRDTools version that comes with Ubuntu 12.04 is 1.4 instead of version 1.3 as indicated in the guide. Also, I haven't gotten around to chance the Spine setup as indicated towards the end of the guide and so far mine is working fine.
At this point you should have your Ubuntu server up and running with Cacti installed and also running.
Since it seems this post is getting a little long, I think I'll break it into two posts. Check back in for the second part.
Here's the link for that second part.
http://practicalschooltech.blogspot.com/2013/10/my-aventures-in-installing-cacti-part-2.html
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