I’m going to make this quick and to the point. Look for details in my upcoming post “Cacti the killer monitoring app? I have now installed Ubuntu 7.04 Server and Cacti in some form more than 18 times in the past two weeks. Most of those have been a frustrating failure! I am by no means a *nix god so most of my problems probably had to do with not knowing the ins and outs of the Ubuntu OS. My failures can probably also be directly attributed to a lack of 7.04 install guides for cacti. So with so many failed attempts and 3 Fully successful attempts both on HP hardware, Dell Hardware and a VM Ware server Virtual Machine I am going to post my 8 basic steps to making cacti work.

1. Download and boot Ubuntu Server 7.04 and choose the LAMP install.

2. sudo apt-get update

3. sudo apt-get install ssh (This is so you don’t have to sit at the console but SSH remotely to complete)

4. sudo apt-get install proftpd (choose standalone, this creates an FTP server for moving files around and backing up.)

5. sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin (Installs GUI console for MySQL)

6. Go to your web browser, surf to the system you just installed, select phpMyAdmin, login as; username:root password:(Leave BLANK), Create user (make the user “cacti”, make the password “cacti”, select the option to create database with the same name and grand full access to user, click create.)

7. sudo apt-get install rrdtool

8. sudo apt-get install cacti (Choose all the defaults, when complete http://(your server ip address)/cact and follow the on screen prompts)

Thats it Cacti should work. I do not promise it will but I have had great luck with this install so far. I am not running my servers in a public forum the are simply test boxes right now. I do not focus on security in this setup. If you plan on using this in production research and lockdown your components!!!

Good luck!