Tag Archives: Networking

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


Unintentional load test

I’ve been a little out of touch with this blog in the last month or so. Ever since Thanksgiving things have been crazy, especially at work with the busy season.

Over the last year we have made some great efforts to dramatically increase our stability as well as availability by increasing redundancy to remove single points of failure. This was on many levels including the networking layer by introducing an HA firewall pair, and an HA load balancer pair. We also built out our server infrastructure by implementing 3 web servers for the load balancing, as well as clustering our database hardware and our application server hardware. All of this was intended to be able to easily handle the load of the retail busy season, between Thanksgiving and New Year’s weekend. To be able to really know how much we could handle we wanted to load test the infrastructure top to bottom. Continue reading Unintentional load test

Virtual Load Balancer Appliance

In our production environment that we host at Rackspace we have an F5 Big IP load balancer.  This is an excellent  product that has way more features than we can ever hope to need.

One problem with this setup is that in our development and staging environments we do not have load balancing and this has caused some issues when moving to production.  Some of the issues we’ve had stem around session persitence and what server the sessions are landing on.  These can be hard to troubleshoot, and if you aren’t seeing them in the Dev or QA processes you are debugging while in production which is not good.

It became pretty evident that we needed to make our staging environment as much like production as we could, so I started to poke around for a virtual load balancer.  After a bit of searching I found several that seemed to fit the need, but many of them were not free.  With a bit more digging I found that the Zeus Traffic Manager product has a developer licence that is free to use for non production environments.  This suits our needs very well as this is just for staging testing.

I downloaded the VMWare template and had the box up in running in no time.  The initial web config is quick and easy, and the developer license was good for 1 year.  After which I assume/hope I can still get another free one.

The web based configuration is clean an easy to understand.  I have never administered a Load Balancer myself, and even so I was able to get all of our staging sites up and running with thier own pools, healthchecks, session persistence settings and everything we have in production.  Our QA team tells me that the speed is noticably better and it has already helped us uncover some issues that we have been fighting with our production servers.

All in this has been a great addition and the best price you can hope for.

Take a look and let me know your experience

Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity

A large part of our PCI and SAS70 compliance is to maintain, and test, a comprehensive and viable Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity plan.  As part of this we will be conducting our annual test of the Technology Availability Plan of our DR plan this coming Friday.  A co-worker and I will be flying to Scottsdale, Arizona where our contracted Disaster Recovery Vendor has it’s data-center that is stipulated for us.

For this test we will be testing VMWare and our ability to recover our vSphere environment.  We will have 3 servers in the test.  The first will be a Windows machine that we will use to install our backup environment and restore data from tape.  The other two machines will be ESX servers that we will setup and configure as our VM hosts.  We will then restore vCenter Server from tape as well as several other critical servers that we call “Tier 0”.

Tier 0 for our DR Plan consists of critical servers that are required to bring the rest of our environment back online in a disaster.  These include, Active Directory, Backup, and a few other infrastructure services that are needed before anything else can be restored.

We hope to have a successful test, and also hope to uncover roadblocks before they become issues in a real world scenario.

GNS3, my new best friend

I’ve just been in a Cisco training for the last few days.  The facility is very clean, nice, and the training was very well laid out and valuable.

As I suspect is often the case with these types of environments there were a few technical issues with our lab equipment.  These classrooms are not dedicated to any one class so keeping the gear in the class is impractical.  There are a lot of moving parts and keeping everything straight and running is surely no small task.  The actual hardware is somewhere else and connected to the classroom via the network.  In our class there were issues with the connection to our gear and it was slowing down our progress.

The instructor very thoughtfully had already prepared an environment that would better facilitate the labs.  In comes GNS3.  I had not used, or even heard of, this little gem and I am sorry for it.  GNS3 is an open source “Graphical Network Simulator” that allows you to model network devices virtually.  Continue reading GNS3, my new best friend