Networknet.nl

While ago I installed CactiEZ 4.0 as a virtual machine on my Hyper-V server and forget the admin password to login into the web interface. I installed the system and didn’t to finish the configuration. When you install CactiEZ and logon for the first time with username ‘admin’ you are required to change the password.

Now my access was blocked.
 

To reset the admin password logon on the appliance console and run the following command lines:

• mysql cacti
• update user_auth set password(md5)=’admin’ where username=’admin’;

This will reset the admin password and allow you to login into the webinterface.

Related links:

• http://www.cacti.net/downloads/docs/html/faq.html

If you are managing and monitoring a network you will probably be interested to keep an eye on the latency of your network links. Especially for those links which are connected with a dedicated internet connection and a IPSec VPN tunnel to the datacenter. Latency is predictable but for non private IP VPN links without reserved bandwidth and QoS/CoS it sometimes may help solve some problems or rethink and discuss high latency with the service provider. With dedicated Framerelay/Leased Line/IP VPN network links you can agree with the service provider on the different latency values and have SLA’s in place.

Latency in a packet-switched network is measured either one-way (the time from the source sending a packet to the destination receiving it), or round-trip (the one-way latency from source to destination plus the one-way latency from the destination back to the source). Round-trip latency is more often quoted, because it can be measured from a single point. Note that round trip latency excludes the amount of time that a destination system spends processing the packet. Many software platforms provide a service called ping that can be used to measure round-trip latency. Ping performs no packet processing; it merely sends a response back when it receives a packet (i.e. performs a no-op), thus it is a relatively accurate way of measuring latency.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latency_%28engineering%29

I am using CactiEZ v0.3 to address this issue and monitor the ping latency. Those hosts may or may not be a SNMP enabled device. If the router is service provider managed than you probably won’t be able to get any access to SNMP, but for this we don’t need it.

a) Create new device in Cacti Management console. See example for www.networknet.nl

b) Choose for Availability “Ping” and use “ICMP” ping as method. Click Add and reopen the device.

c) Locate Associated Graph Templates and choose “Unix-Ping Latency” in the Graph Templates. Click Add.

d) Click “*Create Graphs for this Host”

e) Select “Create: Unix - Ping Latency” graph template and click Create.

f) Choose Red as legend color and click Create. + Created graph: www.networknet.nl - Ping Latency is now created.

i) Create new Graph Tree and add the new created graph for the network latency. See my example.

The result:

After installing CactiEZ 0.30 and you start using the Device Tracking Management (MacTrack plugin) area you may receive the following error when creating new site or device.

Error: save Failed.

 

This error is being generated by the Cacti system because there are no tables in the Cacti database.

Login on the console or with a ssh shell and execute the following commands

cd /var/www/html/plugins/mactrack

php database_upgrade.php

I have couple other issues after scanning a cisco switch, which I will need to follow up on the cactiusers.org forum. The device type list is empty in the newest version of CactiEZ and you will need to populate this yourself now.