Making changes while the poller is running?

JoeNetwork · Joined: 16 Feb 2004 Posts: 38 Location: Westland, MI

I've read a few posts that mentioned potential issues making changes to cacti (adding devices, perhaps adding or making changes to templates also?) that can cause issues with cactid or polling in general.

TheWitness/raX can you elaborate on this? And is this something that's existed the whole time in 0.8.5 as well?

I may have some evidence of things becoming corrupted in the database while manipulating templates, using the 091804 builds of cacti 0.8.6a and cactid... I won't bother taking the screenshots if this is a known issue though.

I am working on a set of templates and ran into a few problems on said installation, but haven't had many problems on the 0.8.6 release builds with a clean install yet. I've noticed things are a bit finicky, probably some due to operator error -- just not re-saving the graph templates properly as a whole before re-trying my output, overall my templates are working better on the 0.8.6 release install versus the 0.8.6a Beta though.

TheWitness · Posted: Sun Sep 19, 2004 5:49 pm Post subject:

JoeNetwork,

When you make changes that affect the poller_item table at the same time that a poll cycle begins, interesting things can happen.

How these "interesting things" manifest themselves, I can not say. In order to understand "how" they will manifest themselves would require me to understand how record and/or table locking works with MySQL, which I don't.

Ian and I plan to take some time before the next major release and re-evaluate the database structure and also evaulate how the UI and the poller engine play together specifically to the issue of not completely understanding the behavior.

To be perfectly honest with you, I have added and deleted hosts while polling is taking place and somethings wierd things have happened, but they appear to correct themselves by the next polling cycle.

I can also tell you that there are certain changes, if made by you or others, require clearing the poller cache before your changes will actually take affect.

Most people developing within Cacti are learning those particular quirks as they go. We will close the gap as the product matures. For now, just enjoy the ride.

TheWitness