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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is out as of last week! I intend to move my workstation to that in the near future. I have to make sure I’m not going to break anything in the process, especially now that I am doing my own monitoring and other functions. Also, others are depending on me to make sure my workstation is working correctly. I’m curious to see how well it works!
MRTG has been one of those tools I have used for years. It has faithfully graphed traffic on various networks. However, as the old commercials use to say, “Move over bacon! There’s something new!” That “something new” is called Cacti. I installed the necessary prerequisites and compiled where needed. The setup of Cacti is fairly straightforward and the interface is pretty darn good, especially given that it is open source software covered under the Gnu Public License version 2 (GPL v2). I would say this software, in tandem with the associated Cactid product, is production-ready for enterprise use. The documentation and forums are fantastic. I am running all of this on a Dell Optiplex GX270 w/1 GB RAM and an 80 GB hard drive (or something like that).
Many, many system and network administrators have installed and use both MRTG and RRDTool from Tobias Oetiker. I’ve been trying to fine tune my MRTG installation and have been looking for a nice front end to MRTG. I’ve not found much that didn’t also require RRDTool.
At my desk, I run Redhat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL4). Redhat’s update and package management service, Redhat Network (RHN), doesn’t have a package for RRDTool. I had to download the source and install it myself. This isn’t too bad, except that the documentation for building on RHEL4 is incomplete. Tobias does mention a permissions issue for RHEL systems that I worked around very easily. He also recommended to make sure the sysadmin installs the -devel packages for some of the dependencies. I installed the -devel rpm’s and tried compiling again. RRDTool still wouldn’t build. I installed tcl-devel because that’s where compiling ended. This helped a bit until the system tried compiling in python. While I have the python-devel package installed, it didn’t help. I googled and found a post about two switches that RHEL4 users might need: –disable-tcl and –disable-python. I ended up needing the second switch and everythign compiled neatly.
I’ve not started using RRDtool yet with MRTG, but I’m working towards it. Small steps. As one of my professors used to say, “Baby steps.”
