[PLUG] cacti is fragile

[drew wymore]

On 4/25/07, Brent Jones <brent at servuhome.net> wrote:
>
> Russell Senior wrote:
> >>>>>> "Aaron" == Aaron Burt <aaron at bavariati.org> writes:
> >
> > Aaron> On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 06:31:56PM -0700, Russell Senior wrote:
> >>>  I just updated a debian box and it broke cacti.  It seems silly
> >>> that it is that fragile.  Can anybody suggest alternatives for
> >>> system/traffic monitoring?
> >
> > Aaron> I usually use nagios.  But can you give any details on the
> > Aaron> breakage?
> >
> > Well, I managed to recover about 80% of it, and it was partly my fault
> > as it turns out.  The debian upgrade installed apache2 (cacti had been
> > running on apache 1.3).  Also, our cacti was (heh) installed from
> > source, so installing the debian cacti package on top busted it
> > (causing the /etc/cacti/apache.conf to point to the wrong place).
> > Reversing those two errors, it is mostly working again.  However, the
> > 20% that is still broken is arguably the most important part, the
> > top-level graphs.  All I get is a text-link to a series of graphs at
> > various time-scales (those work).  There is some unresolved
> > speculation that the mysql upgrade (from v4 -> v5) might be
> > responsible.  The thing that led me to upgrade at all was an inability
> > to create an interface traffic graph for a new host (all the old ones
> > were working), but the rrd creation was failing for some unexplained
> > reason.
> >
> >
>
> Russell;
> There has been a patch on the Cacti website that resolves the graph
> preview display issue.
> http://www.cacti.net/download_patches.php
>
> Problems Displaying RRDtool Graph Thumbnails     2007/02/02
> This patch resolves an issue where Graph Thumbnails do not display
> properly due to an empty comment tag.
>
> Apply the patch, and your graph previews should function properly.
>
> Regards;
>
> Brent Jones
> brent [at] servuhome [dot] net
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On the topic of patches there was a pretty nasty vulnerability linked to
Cacti recently IIRC, it caused quite a bit of chatter on the Nanog mailing
list that I subscribe too. There was a patch out pretty quickly for it but
if I remember the details off the top of my head it was pretty serious.