Installing Cacti on Ubuntu

Recently I was trying to create a free Network Administration Workstation for enterprises for a project. If it should be free of course Linux and Free software comes in handy. Also this machine should work 24/7 for years, so for this workstation, I tried with CentOS-07, Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 14.04 aka Trusty.

From the above three, Trusty ends up winning. It was the easiest OS to install packages for this application. So this post is about installing the RRD-Tool (Round Robin Database Tool) Cacti which collects time series data such as network bandwidth, temperature, CPU load of network devices and which is used to monitor up/down status of devices/links with SNMP and which can act as a Syslog server too.. This is the 1st step of creating the Free Network Administration Workstation..

Download the Ubuntu 14.04 desktop from here and install it.
Don't upgrade the system to latest Ubuntu version..

Be the root user 1st..
sudo su

Enter the following commands to upgrade the packages..
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Install Apache web server, MySQL database, PHP..
apt-get install apache2 mysql-server php5 libapache2-mod-php5

Process will halt to ask for a MySQL root password..

Install RRD-Tool..
apt-get -y install rrdtool

Install SNMP..
apt-get -y install snmp snmpd

Install Cacti..
apt-get -y install cacti cacti-spine

Process will halt again to ask for the configuration parameters for the database..

Select apache2..

Hit Yes..

Enter the MySQL root password you gave in a previous step..

Enter a password for cacti to register with the MySQL database..

Start the SNMP service..
/etc/init.d/snmpd start

Now open the web browser and go to the following link..
http://<ip-address of the Trusty machine>/cacti   or
http://127.0.0.1/cacti

Hit Next..

Hit Next..

Hit Finish..

Enter the username: admin
password: admin

It will then ask to reset the password..

Now you can give the password you want..

To speed up the Poller process, select spine from Console -> Cacti Settings -> Poller

Do not update the system by update notifications. It will stop your SNMP function.

After the Cacti installation, go to System Settings > Software Updates > Updates and set it to be like the following to stop further unnecessary interrupting updates..