Well they say it takes about 21 days to form or change a habit, so let me try to get into the habit of blogging on the magic three days a week. And just cause it gets posted after midnight doesnt mean I wasnt writing/debating/thinking about it on that day, but i will try to be as regular as a fiber rich diet.

This one is something I did recently, and the the mighty Kolbold asked me for something that could help monitor network traffic.

The first thing that I thought of was Cacti because it allows you to configure an snmp community on a switch, the get the data and graph it in a nice simple to view interface that can update quickly. Check out the screen shots on the cacti home page.

The quickest way I have found to deploy this has been with CentOS and then using a guide I found online at Karl's Place. This being a CentOS install a couple of steps while you start the install should be taken into account. If you have never installed CentOS before that is ok just keep a few things in mind. When installing choose custom and server install for packages. You want to install MySQL server, HTTP Server, PHP for web and MySQL, with the firewall and security area's be aware of what you are doing there, if you are going to use IPTables and SELinux make sure you know how they work. The rest of the packages are listed in the Karl's Place link.

After you have your system booted, make sure you allow access to your web site by removing

deny from all

from the /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file.

Start the apache service:
service httpd start

Make it start automaticly
chkconfig httpd start

Start MySQL service
service mysqld start

Make it start automaticly
chkconfig mysqld on

After these services are installed and running is when I installed the DAG repository then I did the snmp install:
yum install snmp

then started snmp service
service snmpd start

and set it to automaticly start
chkconfig snmpd start

after that you can follow the rest of the instructions on the cacti install to install the database and create the DB user.

Also, I never set the crontab job to run the cacti script every five minutes. I wasnt using it that intensely and it did update my graphs afterwards.

I will try to do these steps again by friday and post some screen caps with how I configured some basics in Cacti, until then.