evolution creations

When you run your PHP script you get the error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function curl_init()

This is most likely caused by PHP not having the curl module installed. To fix, you want to run:

sudo apt-get install php5-curl 

restart Apache and then check your phpinfo page to verify if this is showing up or not.

http://evolutioncreations.wik.is/Ubuntu/FAQ%27s/PHP/Fatal_error%3a_Call_to_undefined_function_curl_init()

This is being installed on a vanilla VM image with LAMP and OpenSSH server installed. The first thing you will want to do is:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo apt-get install openssh-server mysql-server php5 apache2 php5-mysql

I installed mine on a clean 8.04 VM image, so your environment may be slightly different, but going back to a vanilla install, this guide should be completely accurate. 

Some software packages require older versions of Java to run. To do this, you will want to run:

sudo apt-get install sun-java5-jre sun-java5-plugin sun-java5-font

To test this afterwards, you can run:

java -version

And you should see version 1.5.0.15 show up.

During startup, any administration knows that this is where you need to be aware of the things going on with your system. But out of the box, Ubuntu comes ready to suppress the errors and display a nice splash screen.

To get around this and get your information back you want to run:

sudo joe /boot/grub/menu.lst

and locate the below:

title Ubuntu 8.04.1, kernel 2.6.24-19-generic
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-19-generic root=UUID=ed59a33a-69bf-4a01-af11-be65b87b4286 ro quiet splash xforcevesa
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-19-generic
quiet

You just want to remove quiet splash so it reads:

title Ubuntu 8.04.1, kernel 2.6.24-19-generic
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.24-19-generic root=UUID=ed59a33a-69bf-4a01-af11-be65b87b4286 ro xforcevesa
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.24-19-generic
quiet

Obviously you’ll want to do this for the appropriate kernel title that you are using, as of the date of this posting it was 2.6.24-19.

So tonight my long download finally completed, and I had about 36 updates that were pending to go through, so naturally I just tried to do an apt-get update/upgrade, and wouldn’t you know about half way through the process, I got a failure to commit data to disk. And during restart I got an error that the disk was dirty.

Of all the things! So what I recommend people do, when you manually shutdown the machine, force the machine to fsck! Run the following from terminal:

sudo touch /forcefsck

This will place an empty file in / called forcefsk and restart your computer normally. This will force the system to fsck the disk during startup.

So after coming back from holiday’s the only box that was on my network was my Linux router/server/firewall. In powering up all the other Windows machines two of them came back online ok and started reporting graphs, but my main Windows box didn’t. The error when I went into Cacti Admin > Console > Devices > The Device was: SNMP Error right under the upper left corner of the window under SNMP Information.

The first thing that I went to check was under Control Panels > Administrative Tools > Services and verified that the SNMP Service and SNMP Trap were both set to automatically start, and are both running. I went in to check the configuration of the SNMP service and the IP address that it was set to report to is correct and the community is fine.

So to break through all the walls here, the first test that you should run is:

snmpwalk -Os -c public -v 1 xxx.xxx.xxx.xx system

Replace the XXX’s with the actual internal IP address. Now what’s interesting for me is that my main box has two NIC’s on it; 192.168.1.8 and 192.168.1.20. When I ran the test against the first IP address, I received the below error:

george@otani:~$ snmpwalk -Os -c public -v 1 192.168.1.8 system
Timeout: No Response from 192.168.1.8

But when I ran it against the 192.168.1.20 IP, I received a response:

george@otani:~$ snmpwalk -Os -c public -v 1 192.168.1.20 system
sysDescr.0 = STRING: Hardware: x86 Family 6 Model 15 Stepping 11 AT/AT COMPATIBLE – Software: Windows Version 6.0 (Build 6001 Multiprocessor Free)
sysObjectID.0 = OID: enterprises.311.1.1.3.1.1
sysUpTimeInstance = Timeticks: (216315) 0:36:03.15
sysContact.0 = STRING:
sysName.0 = STRING: COMPUTERNAME
sysLocation.0 = STRING:
sysServices.0 = INTEGER: 76

This boils down to a firewall or some sort of block that is causing this error. If you don’t have two NIC’s, start with troubleshooting it at the local firewall level or at your router level. But changing the device IP from 192.168.1.8 to 192.168.1.20, I received the following within Cacti:

GEORGE-INTEL-DESKTOP (192.168.1.20) SNMP Information
System: Hardware: x86 Family 6 Model 15 Stepping 11 AT/AT COMPATIBLE – Software: Windows Version 6.0 (Build 6001 Multiprocessor Free)
Uptime: 218222 (0 days, 0 hours, 36 minutes)
Hostname: COMPUTERNAME
Location:
Contact:

On the new Apache2 instance that I have running Cacti, I ran into a problem where I get the error message:

apache2: Could not reliably determine the server’s fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName

To fix this, I have to add the following line into the /etc/apache2/httpd.conf file:

ServerName nameofserver

Replace nameofserver with the actual name of the server that you want to have Apache configured under.

So to jazz things up again, I wanted to move away from the PHP poller, and install Spined, which is the poller daemon that can be used instead of the PHP program and is much more efficient for larger systems.

To start with, you want to download the latest version of Spine from the website here. Once you have downloaded the tar ball (I downloaded it to my /home/george directory (you will want to change george to whatever your current user is)), and run:

tar zxvf cacti-spine-0.8.7a.tar.gz

and then you want to:

cd cacti-spine-0.8.7a

From this directory, you will need to run:

./configure

Now when I did this, I got into loads of problems, because it was telling me that:

error: cannot run /bin/bash conifg/config.sub

To get around this, I had to run:

sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient15-dev libsnmp9-dev automake libtool

Then I was able to run:

aclocal
libtoolize –force
autoconf
autoheader
automake
./configure

In that order. Each of the above lines needs to be run separetely. Once you successfully run the ./configure, you can run:

make

to make the binary. Now once that has gone through for you, you will need to create a directory:

sudo mkdir /usr/local/spine

and then execute:

sudo cp spine* /usr/local/spine

This will move the spine binary and spine.conf files from your /home directory to the /usr/local/spine directory.

Then you want to run:

sudo joe /usr/local/spine/spine.conf

and modify the configuration to the proper settings for your cacti database instance. If you used my previous guide your information should be:

DB_Host localhost
DB_Database cacti
DB_User cacti
DB_Pass xxxxxx
DB_Port 3306

You will replace the xxxxxx with the password that you setup for your Cacti database during the installation.

Finally you will need to login to Cacti, and go to Console > Settings > Paths, and modify the path for Spine under the Alternative Poller Path section:

/usr/local/spine/spine

When you click on save, the words under the path field for Spine should read:

[OK: FILE FOUND]

Then you will want to click on the Poller tab and set this from cmd.php to spine and save your settings. This should be it and you should be using Spine as your poller!

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