August 18th, 2010 |
A lot of people use the CactiEZ virtual appliance to install a running Cacti environment. The latest CactiEZ virtual appliance (CactiEZ v0.6) uses Cacti v0.8.7c with Plugin Architecture 2.2. Of course a lot of people are developing Cacti and the latest stable version is Cacti v0.8.7g with Plugin Architecture 2.8.
I always have trouble with upgrading Cacti, because you have to take multiple steps and you shouldn’t forget one. This blog post helps, because it shows the steps to take for upgrading to the latest version of Cacti.
I always start with changing the default behavior of the cp command. The command default adds the parameter –i, which creates an interactive command. The result of the –i parameter is an overwrite question before copying, like shown below.
cp: overwrite `/var/www/html/docs/html/data_input_methods.html’?
This behavior can be changed by deleting or commenting out the cp-alias within /root/.bashrc. Don’t forget to logout and login again.
Now we are ready to upgrade Cacti. Let’s go.
1. First you need to backup the current Cacti database;
mysqldump -l –add-drop-table cacti > cacti_sql_backup
2. Backup your current Cacti html directory;
mv /var/www/html /var/www/html.bak
3. Copy the new tarball to the target system and extract the tarball;
tar zxvf cacti-0.8.7g.tar.gz
4. Move the new files over the Cacti root directory;
mv /root/cacti-0.8.7g/ /var/www/html/
5. Edit include/config.php to include the correct database credentials and default session name;
$database_type = “mysql”;
$database_default = “cacti”;
$database_hostname = “localhost”;
$database_username = “cactiuser”;
$database_password = “cactiuser”;
$database_port = “3306″;
#$cacti_session_name = “CactiMadeEZ”;
6. Copy the *.rrd files, scripts and XML files from the old Cacti directory;
cp /var/www/html.bak/rra/* /var/www/html/rra/.
cp -rfv /var/www/html.bak/scripts/* /var/www/html/scripts/
cp -rfv /var/www/html.bak/resource/* /var/www/html/resource/
7. Set the appropriate owner and permissions;
chown –R apache:apache /var/www/html
8. Go the the Cacti website and follow the screen instructions to upgrade the database;
9. Copy and extract the plugin architecture tarball, copy .diff file to the Cacti root directory and apply the patch;
tar zxvf cacti-plugin-0.8.7g-PA-v2.8.tar.gz
cp /root/cacti-plugin-arch/cacti-plugin-0.8.7g-PA-v2.8.diff /var/www/html/.
cd /var/www/html
patch -p1 –N < cacti-plugin-0.8.7g-PA-v2.8.diff
10. Change the file include/global.php to include the correct database credentials, default session name and the plugin list;
/* Default database settings*/
$database_type = “mysql”;
$database_default = “cacti”;
$database_hostname = “localhost”;
$database_username = “cactiuser”;
$database_password = “cactiuser”;
$database_port = “3306″;
/* Default session name – Session name must contain alpha characters */
$cacti_session_name = “CactiMadeEZ”;
$plugins = array();
$plugins[] = ‘settings’;
<..>
$plugins[] = ‘superlinks’;
11. Copy the old plugins directory;
cp -rfv /var/www/html.bak/plugins/* /var/www/html/plugins/.
12. Go to Configuration – Plugin Management to install / enable your plugins. Install / enable the plugin loginmod to get your customized login page back.
Now the upgrade is ready and you are set to experience your freshly upgraded CactiEZ appliance.
