Cacti is a great tool to graph performance of the various hardware components of a network. With the use of the yum repository manager, it is very simple to install on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or CentOS 5.

Install steps

• First make sure that you have the dag repository configured in yum. Edit or create the file /etc/yum.repos.d/dag.repo:
[dag]
name=Dag RPM Repository for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
baseurl=http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el$releasever/en/$basearch/dag
gpgcheck=0
enabled=1
protect=0
• Now install the required packages:
sudo yum install net-snmp mysql mysql-server cacti
• Edit the /etc/httpd/conf.d/cacti.conf file to allow access to cacti as needed.
• Make sure Apache and MySQL are started and set to start automatically:
sudo service mysqld start
sudo service httpd start
sudo chkconfig –level 345 mysqld on
sudo chkconfig –level 345 httpd on
• Set up the cacti database in MySQL:
sudo mysqladmin –user=root create cacti
cd /var/www/cacti
sudo mysql cacti < cacti.sql
sudo mysql --user=root mysql
mysql> GRANT ALL ON cacti.* TO cactiuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY ‘cactiuser’;
mysql> SET PASSWORD FOR cactiuser = PASSWORD('my_super_secret_cacti_password');
mysql> flush privileges;
mysql> exit
sudo mysqladmin –user=root password "my_super_secret_root_password"
• Setup the cacti poll schedule in /etc/crontab:
*/5 * * * * cacti php /var/www/cacti/poller.php > /dev/null 2>&1
• Run the cacti installer in the browser:
http://your.server.com/cacti/index.php provide the user and password for the database, you can accept all defaults and just click next
• That is it, you are good to go.

References

Installing Cacti on CentOS with yum