Time for action – downloading Cacti

It's now time to download the latest version of Cacti to your server. You will need your system username and password to login to your CentOS installation. If you have installed your CentOS system with the default settings, you should already have an SSH server running. If you're already logged on to the machine, you can ignore the first step.

1. From a Windows machine, logon to your system using an SSH client such as Putty. If this is the first time you have connected to the server, Putty will display a security alert and ask you to accept the RSA key. By doing so, Putty will display the logon prompt where you can logon to the system.

2. Maximize the window, so that long text lines do not break at the end of the line. This will make things easier.

3. You'll need to become the root user in order to be able to setup Cacti properly. Should that not be an option, performing these steps with sudo should achieve the same results.

4. Navigate to /var/www/html. This is the document root for Apache.

5. To download Cacti you can use the wget command. Enter the following command to download Cacti. After entering the wget command, right-clicking into the window client using Putty will paste the URL you copied earlier after the command:

   wget http://www.cacti.net/downloads/cacti-0.8.7g.tar.gz
   

   You should see the following output on your screen:

   

6. You now have the tar.gz file on your system, so let's move on and extract it. To do this, enter the following command:

   tar-xzvf cacti-0.8.7g.tar.gz
   

7. This will extract the files and directories contained in the archive to the current directory.

8. Finally you are going to create a symbolic link to this new Cacti directory. This will allow you to easily switch between different Cacti versions later, for example, when upgrading Cacti. To create a symbolic link, enter the following command:

   ln –s cacti-0.8.7g cacti
   

9. This will create a link named cacti which points to the cacti-0.8.7g directory:

   

What just happened?

You downloaded the latest Cacti version to the root directory of the web server and created a symbolic link to the extracted directory. With the Cacti files in place, you are now ready for the next phase of the installation process.

Creating the database

The database isn't automatically created during the installation of Cacti. Therefore, you need to create it here. At the same time, a database user for Cacti should be created to allow it to access the database. It's also a good idea to secure the MySQL database server by using one of the included CentOS tools.