All posts by Kevin Noall

CentOS7 Cacti Virtual Appliance Upgrade commands

Here is a list of steps for upgrading my Cacti virtual appliance in place retaining all data. This will only work on the Centos7_Cacti-v1.1.6 or greater. This assumes you are still using the original Cacti user, passwords, and paths.

If there are any questions, please use GitHub Issues, and I can assist and update as needed.


 [Update 12/4/2018]

It turns out there has been some development in Smokeping after almost 4 years of quiet! New v2.7.2 is available, so I created a new Smokeping update routine and added it to the script. This will check if you have Smokeping installed, and offer to upgrade if you wish. This can be run via the same routine as the Cacti upgrade from Github below.

[UPDATE 11-28-2018]

I have a first working version of an automated update routine for the cacti-template you can get here. You can get the instructions on how to run it here…

https://github.com/KnoAll/cacti-template

Cacti Network Grapher Virtual Appliance

cactiThis virtual appliance is based on CentOS 7 and is designed to be lightweight, and stable. It has only a minimum of tools installed to make Cacti work.

The OS is set to DHCP, and Cacti is installed.

The username at the console, and passwords set for everything should be ‘cacti’ this will include root and mysql. **With the exception of the Cacti web ui “admin” user, which has the password “Cactipw1!” (no quotes)

The web UI username and password are “admin” and “Cactipw1!” (no quotes)

Cacti is all configured up and includes some plugins, which are not installed by default. It also has some additional host templates for Palo Alto firewalls, Cisco ASA Firewalls, F5 BIG-IP load balancers, and a few other things I have found useful over the years.

There is not a ton of documentation, as I simply have not had time.  If you are already familiar with Cacti it should be a breeze.  If there are any questions, please use GitHub Issues, and I can assist and update as needed.




[Update 10/30/2020]

  • Upgraded to new Cacti and Spine v1.2.14 released 8/02/2020
  • Updated all plugins
  • Upgraded PHP to v7.3
  • Upgraded MariaDB to v10.5
  • Various other fixes and tweaks

CentOS7 Appliance with v1.2.14 Cacti, OVA is ~2.6g

[Update 12/10/2019]

  • Upgraded to new Cacti and Spine v1.2.8 released 12/08/2019
  • Updated all plugins
  • Various other fixes and tweaks

LEGACY – CentOS7 Appliance with v1.2.8 Cacti, OVA is ~2.4g

[Update 7/17/2019]

  • Upgraded to new Cacti and Spine v1.2.5 released 7/15/2019
  • Updated all plugins
  • Various other fixes and tweaks
  • Now can upgrade the virtual disk in VMWare

LEGACY – CentOS7 Appliance with v1.2.5 Cacti, OVA is ~2.3g

[Update 1/23/2019]

  • Upgraded to new Cacti and Spine v1.2.1 released 1/20/2019
  • Updated all plugins
  • Various other fixes and tweaks
  • ./cacti-upgrade.sh now installed by default at root of cacti user directory

LEGACY – CentOS7 Appliance with v1.2.1 Cacti, OVA is ~2.3g

[Update 1/4/2019]

New Cacti v1.2.0 is released! TONS of new features and fixes. You can run my update script to automatically update the template. https://github.com/KnoAll/cacti-template this will also offer to update the Smokeping to newly released v2.7.3 as well. There is also a new prompt to disable the Smokeping service if you do not use Smokeping.

 [Update 12/4/2018]

It turns out there has been some development in Smokeping after almost 4 years of quiet! New v2.7.2 is available, so I created a new Smokeping update routine and added it to the script. This will check if you have Smokeping installed, and offer to upgrade if you wish. This can be run via the same routine as the Cacti upgrade from Github below.

[Update 11/28/2018]

I have a first working version of an automated update routine for the cacti-template you can get here. You can get the instructions on how to run it here…

https://github.com/KnoAll/cacti-template

[Update 11/16/2018]

Hello anyone who is listening! the Cacti team is working on the new v1.2 of Cacti which is now in it’s 2nd beta release. I am working on updating the template along with this and there are a lot of changes! I’m also building an upgrade script that can be used to upgrade the appliance with little effort. (Sorry, for now it will only work on the new v1.2.x appliance) More to follow as things progress.

[Update 4/2/2018]

  • Upgraded to new Cacti and Spine v1.1.37 released 3/25/2018
  • Updated all plugins

LEGACY – CentOS7 Appliance with v1.1.37 Cacti, OVA is ~2.2g


Web Farm Framework IIS Bindings

Ok, so here is my approach to bindings in IIS using  Web Farm Framework 2.x. I have seen several ways of doing this, but all involved setting up replace rules for WFF and I didn’t want to mess with that.

What I do is, on my controller webserver, I add all of the bindings for each of the machines. In the drop down menu for IP address, you can manually type in the IP, and the server will let you add anything, regardless of it being assigned to the machine. Then IIS will accept the requests for which it has an assigned IP address, the rest will be there but not do anything. These settings will propagate to all of your servers in your WFF Server Farm, and you will be able to maintain your single point of administration for IIS.

WordPress Excerpt on Pages

WordPress is awesome, and I love it, but sometimes little things get taken out that frustrate me.  For example, in v3.1+ they removed the ability to add custom excerpts to pages.  This was a frustration for me, and I of course had to go out to Google to find how to make it work again.  That’s when I quickly found this nice post that clearly detailed how to add it back in.  Nice, easy to follow post with screenshots.  Nice work!

WP Super Cache Preload issues

I’ve been working on one of my other blogs trying to get the preload function working in WP Super Cache.  It seems pretty straight forward, but for some reason there are a couple of issues.

First, the timed preload of cache files does not seem to work reliably.  I had set it to 30 minutes with email notifications, and it would only go once, or twice at the most.  Beyond that it would just not do anything at all.  Once, I even turned off the scheduled preload and it did it anyway!

Secondly, even when doing a manual preload of the cache, the preloaded files get removed from the cache even though the description clearly indicates that supercache files from the preload will not be removed by the garbage collection.  I even went so far as to disable the GC with the same result.

I’ve created a forum post with the hopes of getting some help.  I’ll keep this updated as things hopefully progress…