raXnet - cacti REQUIREMENTS: Cacti should be able to run on any Unix-based operating system with the following requirements: PHP 4.0+ MySQL 3.22+ PHP Must also be compiled as a standalone cgi binary. This is required for data gathering in crontab. This requirement may go away in the future if I decide to replace it with a small C program. If anyone wishes to do this, please contact me first; that would be much appreciated. Cacti has been successfully run on the following operating systems: Redhat 7.2 (Linux 2.4.9-13) Redhat 7.1 (Linux 2.4.9-6) FreeBSD 4.2 Windows 2000 Professional/Server Slackware 8.0 Debian Linux SuSE Linux 7.3 A Note About Debian: Under Debian Linux, the PHP binary is available as the php4-cgi package. This package creates a separate php.ini, so you must edit your 'php4/cgi/php.ini' file and add line that says 'extension=mysql.so'. If you get cacti running on other operating systems, please contact me, I will add the names to the list. A Note About SuSE 7.3: The SNMP support that comes with PHP 4.0.6 does not appear to work correctly under SuSE Linux 7.3. It is recommended that you go to http://www.php.net/, download the newest source and compile a new PHP-binary with SNMP support. INFORMATION ABOUT CACTI: Cacti is a complete frontend to rrdtool, it stores all of the nessesary information to create graphs and populate them with data in a MySQL database. The frontend is completely PHP driven. Along with being able to maintain Graphs, Data Sources, and Round Robin Archives in a database, cacti handles the data gathering also. There is also SNMP support for those used to creating traffic graphs with MRTG. To handle data gathering, you can feed cacti the paths to any external script/command along with any data that the user will need to "fill in", cacti will then gather this data in a cron-job and populate a MySQL database/the round robin archives. Data Sources can also be created, which correspond to actual data on the graph. For instance, if a user would want to graph the ping times to a host, you could create a data source choosing a script that pings a host and returns it's value in milliseconds. After defining options for rrdtool such as how to store the data you will be able to define any additional information that the data input source requires, such as a host to ping in this case. Once a data source is created, it is automatically mantained at 5 minute intervals. For those that are used to creating traffic graphs in MRTG, this process has become much simplier in cacti. An SNMP interface allows you to enter SNMP capable hosts and cacti will display that host's interfaces, all which can be graphed will once click from that point. Once one or more data sources are defined, an rrdtool graph can be created using the data. Cacti allows you to create almost any imaginable rrdtool graph using all of the standard rrdtool graph types and consolidation functions. A color selection area and automatic text padding function also aid in the creation of graphs to make the process easier. Not only can you create rrdtool based graphs in cacti, but there are many ways to display them. Along with a standard "list view" and a "preview mode", which resembles the rrdtool frontend 14all, there is a "tree view", which allows you to put graphs onto a hierarchical tree for organizational purposes. Due to the many functions of cacti, a user based management tool is built in so you can add users and give them rights to certain areas of cacti. This would allow someone to create some users that can change graph parameters, while others can only view graphs. Each user also mantains their own settings when it comes to viewing graphs. 04012002/raXnet
