Cacti is a webbased open source software tool for the collecting and graphical displaying of data. This data can be read from Cacti over SNMP or via your own scripts. Thus Cacti is able to read nearly all machine-readable data sources. The data will be stored in a Round Robin Database (RRD). In this form of data storage the older data will be stored at a lower resolution than new data. The oldest data will be overwritten.

The installation of Cacti can be done via the web interface over Pakfire.

If you finished the installation successfully, you can open the Webinterface from Cacti the first time. There are still some steps to be completed on the system. If Cacti is installed on the local system, you can reach it by a browser over:

http://ipfirehost:1009/

If you get an error about inability to connect to the database, the installation has not prepared a database for you. In this case, you must manually create a database from the IPFire command line. Log into the router via ssh (be sure you have ssh access turned on in the GUI and check for the correct ssh port, 222 is the default).

 ssh -p 222 root@ip_of_router

Now, you will log into mysql, create a database and a user with access to the database, then you will load the database with the initial default data. In the following example, we're using the same values defined in the cacti default configuration file (/usr/share/cacti/include/config.php) though you can edit this file and change the values in the following. First, log into mysql

 mysql  # log into mysql

The following commands are issued within the MySQL console connection. To use the default values, you can simply copy/paste this.

 create database cacti;
 grant all on cacti.* to cactiuser@localhost identified by 'cactiuser';
 quit

Now, load the default data

 mysql cacti < /usr/share/cacti/cacti.sql

Things should now work if you log into the router at:

http://ipfirehost:1009/

Afterwards you arrive at the login window of Cacti. For the first log-in the user name is admin and the password are likewise admin

The password must be modified then immediately.

Now you can reach Cacti over the browser address

http://ipfirehost:1009/ 

and admin as user name and the before modified password.