[HOWTO] Cacti Install Howto on a FreeBSD

shanali · Joined: 20 Feb 2003 Posts: 20

hi,

Thought it would be great to share with the rest of the you one of the most hasslefree way of installing cacti.

The system is FreeBSD/amd64 running on Xeons (~3Ghz) but applicable to any FreeBSD distro because of FreeBSD's excellent Ports architecture.

Dependencies requiring for Cacti's operation are not even an issue to talk about

and thats where FreeBSD based install rocks while delivering the latest build of Cacti whenever you would update FreeBSD ports system.

take care and thanks to cacti.

georgew · Joined: 22 May 2005 Posts: 21

You forgot the php.ini file...

Freebsd doesn't have one by default, and so your poller script
will run out of memory, and fail to display graphs.

Whomever is maintaining the freebsd php port is causing a lot
of headaches by leaving this important file out.

shanali · Joined: 20 Feb 2003 Posts: 20

hmm... interesting comment because i never touch php.ini (infact freebsd doesn't have one as you rightly mentioned)...

so far my poller script hasn't ran out of memory... (6mths of uptime)... but i believe if you happen to hit this problem then perhaps i'll keep an eye on it.

thanks!

rony · Posted: Sat Nov 12, 2005 7:22 pm Post subject:

Poller will run out of memory on larger installations when you use over 8 megs of ram.

Also depends on the type of metrics the poller is pulling, snmp, scripts, php script server, etc.

shanali · Joined: 20 Feb 2003 Posts: 20

TnTBass · Joined: 03 Nov 2006 Posts: 2

Any chance I could get an example of someone's httpd.conf? I'm trying to install cacti on a FreeBSD 6.1 machine from scratch. I started with a mini install and built from there, but I'm finding the docs hard to follow as they seem to assume mysql and apache are already running, and you know what to do to configure it. I'm still fairly new to Apache and MySQL so I'm kind of struggling. Any help would be nice!

shanali · Joined: 20 Feb 2003 Posts: 20

finchwizard · Joined: 29 Sep 2003 Posts: 5

I just installed Cacti on my FreeBSD 6.1 server, I've installed it a few times on Linux servers fine but have this problem with the memory.

cat: /proc/meminfo: No such file or directory
cat: /proc/meminfo: No such file or directory

When running the poller.php

I just grabbed the zip, so it wasn't compiled from Ports or anything.

Is there a way to get that going with BSD?

I also changed the graphing thing to ucd/net memory usage, but doesn't seem to help either.

mpb · Joined: 06 Nov 2006 Posts: 12

I also run FreeBSD and use ports - however:

its best to read through the install/readme of cacti beforehand so you know what to expect.

php support in apache does not happen by default as seen in the previous post. neither is mysql server intsalled by default, and of course is a requirement.

so IMHO its best to have mysql, apache, php as known working on your box, and then installing cacti on top of these - and it will avoid some pain. Just installing cacti and hoping and expecting that all dependencies will fall into place and work automagically is perhaps abit too much to expect.

finchwizard · Joined: 29 Sep 2003 Posts: 5

Yep, PHP, MySQL and Apache were all installed fine, along with php5-extensions and enabled in php.ini etc.

I tried SNMP again, and managed to find how to configure it up properly with the snmpconf utility.

All working now =)

TnTBass · Joined: 03 Nov 2006 Posts: 2

spaam · Joined: 14 Jun 2006 Posts: 4

fmangeant · Posted: Fri Nov 10, 2006 5:53 am Post subject:

Hi

the snmpd.conf configuration is covered in the HowTo in my signature.

hayzar23 · Joined: 13 Nov 2007 Posts: 1

shanali,

At what part of your install are you supposed to install apache or another http sever? This is a WEB application, maybe that would be worthy of being mentioned at some point in your instructions.

zgamer · Joined: 23 Sep 2006 Posts: 45 Location: WI, USA

Just as a general comment, FreeBSD 6 works great with Cacti. Currently running it in a VMWare appliance with the MacTrak, Weathermap, and Monitor plug-ins monitoring over 300 devices.