Am I a Moron or does Cacti take way too long to get working?

SuperDave · Guest

I followed the Win32 installation to the letter. Luckily a coworker had also installed it on his W2K box and I could rely on him for help. Although I'm still having problems. The following is what I've come up with so far:

1) must create a c:/usr/mib directory and copy the c:/php/mibs info into it. There's gotta be a better way than copying files like this. (I haven't had a chance to look at the code thoroughly to see where it is referencing this...
2) The editing of the PHP.INI to turn off warning. Having it on you will get all sorts of HTML Headers already sent.
3) Need to get a copy of the SNMPUTIL.EXE from where place (I got mine from my cowork!) and copy somewhere like C:\RRDTOOL
4) Use a forward slash instead of a backslash for all path statements. I.E. use C:/inetpub/wwwroot instead of C:\inetpub\wwwroot
5) Need to download the unxutils.zip to get the AWK, GREP, etc. Someone on this newsgroup mentioned Cygwin. Well, what component do I need? I dont' want the entire application. I didn't see awk in the list of utilities either...???
6) when running the cmd.php file for Cacti, there are a bunch of meaningless errors and takes for ever to track down. For example:
C:\rrdtool>c:\php\php.exe c:\inetpub\wwwroot\cacti-0.6.8\cmd.php
Can't open perl script "c:/inetpub/wwwroot/cacti-0.6.8/scripts/users.pl": No suc
h file or directory
The system cannot find the path specified.
cat: /proc/meminfo: No such file or directory
cat: /proc/meminfo: No such file or directory
cat: /proc/meminfo: No such file or directory
'ps' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
cat: /proc/meminfo: No such file or directory
wc: C:/Inetpub/wwwroot/cacti-0.6.8/access_log: No such file or directory
cat: /proc/meminfo: No such file or directory
'uptime' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.2.1
Content-type: text/html

These are the errors I'm still getting. I had also had to modify the following to get paste the other errors:
* Change users.pl to call "who" instead of "w". I still haven't found "w" utilitity yet. This will eliminate the "w command or filename not found"
* I was getting a bunch of awk errors and determined the single quotes within the ping.pl and sql.php. for the awk output needed to be change to double quotes.
* There are some hardcoded directory paths references in cacti.sql and webhits.php. These should probably be moved to config.php or removed???
* I still need to find me "ps", "cat", "uptime", etc. ... But the script appears to run.

It would appear that RRDTOOL is collecting the data. However, Cacti is not building the images. The "GRAPHS" tab only shows text..

Anyone have any ideas?

SuperDave · Guest

As a followup to me previous e-mail -- apparently everything is working....

Since the "GRAPHS" tab was not showing any data, I moved my cactie home directory from IIS to Apache's httdocs and everything displays...

Something is going on under IIS that images are not being displayed. I assume it is a slash problem. Going to go look now!

khutton · Posted: Fri Jun 21, 2002 9:08 am Post subject: So is it displaying graphs?

I read your messages and am confused as to where you are having a problem. I am working on a very detailed set of instalation instructions for my XP box. I should have it up soon.

I have cacti up and running and am in the process of trying to nail down the little errors you are talking about. All of the command you are refferencing like "cat" and "ps" are unix/linux commands that are executed by the scripts. This is why you need the unix utils or cygwin. I am trying to avoid downloading cygwin by looking for vb scripts to replace the pl scripts and use WMI type commands or commands that windows understands.

If you are not getting the graphs its probably because the commands in the scripts are written for unix machines (I sound redundant.... I know). I was able to get my box to look at my Cisco PIX 515 and get the interfaces and then I was able to create the graphs for them. I have not been able to get any of the "stock" graphs to work properly. I believe this is from the lack of a shell that can interpret the commands from the standard scripts.

Hope this helps.

SuperDave · Guest

Yes, many of the scripts will have to be reworked for Windows machines, but that wasn't my only problem.

I have it working and SNMP is being tracked from an NT server I have. I'm still playing with logging Apache data and ping, etc.

Most of the problems I've resolved was never mentioned in the Windows Installation document -- such as Unix Utilities, and a bunch of other stuff that I mentioned in my original e-mail.

The average non-technical person won't be able to get Cacti to work under Windows without a more streamlined installation.

I still haven't figured out why IIS doesn't display the graphics but Apache does -- I'm using the same root directory between the two....

Guest · Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2002 5:39 pm Post subject:

To the first poster of this topic -

I have a better idea - If you're unsure how to make all of this stuff work, then go buy some commercial network management product. Openview is only around $100K, the Lucent product is only $300K. But, hey, ONE CLICK !

Sorry you don't have the cross platform experience to make this stuff work. It's not rocket science. You have to be willing to put some work into it to make it work in your environment.

Those executables you were complaining about are not part of Cacti, so they can't be bundled in.

I know how HARD it is to copy files to C:\USR\MIBS ! All that typing !

I can safely guess that you love to blame others for your own weaknesses...

I guess beggars CAN be choosers...

DavidM · Guest

Khutton -- do you have installation instructions for Cacti under Windows XP?

Guest · Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2003 9:53 pm Post subject:

Is there a thread with a step by step w32 install?

jlancaster · Joined: 04 Feb 2003 Posts: 38 Location: Dallas, TX

I too followed the W32 instructions to the letter and have had to make a number of adjustments to getthings working on my WinXP Pro workstation.

To the guy rewriting the installation instructions be sure to add these:
(1) Must create a C:\tmp directory. I got all kinds of wierd errors until I added this.
(2) In a Windows environment you probably don't need the default Linux server scripts running. I just removed them from my list of active data sources and the "w,awk,cat,update" etc errors went away.

I found it easier to start with the SNMP graphs first.

Now I'm working to add the scripts4nt.

khutton · Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2003 8:05 am Post subject:

i have posted both linux install adn W32 install instructions on the groups. Do a search for my name and you should come across them. If not, ask rax for them. He should have a copy of both that I sent to him.

mlsommer

Where are the updated Windows install directions you talked about khutton?

I'm stuck!

khutton · Posted: Mon Feb 24, 2003 9:42 am Post subject:

do a search for my name and you hsould find the windows instructions. use the search page, its a life saver. rax has not posted the instructions I sent him. Very busy man. I tried to look for them to email to you directly but I can not find them

tyr this link for the directions

http://www.raxnet.net/board/viewtopic.php?t=534&highlight=