(Usual disclaimer applies: Use this on a test system, I don’t claim this to be bulletproof if you’ve made changes etc. ;) but it should work ! ie. did for me on a fully running system )

Install cacti via aptitude as per usual, loads of guides out there for that; configure it etc. can even add hosts. It doesn’t break anything, so this can be an upgrade on a current running system.

Download Hardy’s cacti deb from http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/web/cacti

Install that locally, you’ll then need to follow the upgrade process via the browser again. Be careful if you used cactid rather than the php script you’ll need to make sure it’s not looking for spine (the new cactid name) which hasn’t changed as of yet.I simply modified the path in the config to point at the current cactid binary file.

After  all that, check it’s running, it should be ! Then you can grab the Cacti Plugin Architecture from http://cactiusers.org/downloads/cacti-plugin-arch.tar.gz

Best thing to do here is make a quick backup of /usr/share/cacti/site

cd /usr/share/cacti/

sudo cp -a /usr/share/cacti/site /usr/share/cacti/site_BACKUP

Then untar the  plugin-arch tarball to the /usr/share/cacti/ directory and copy the directory within and the patch file into your /usr/share/cacti/site directory and follow the details on the cactiusers.org page to patch them, note do not overwrite files as this totally messes up the changes Ubuntu has made to the Cacti package.

There’s a tiny fix needs to be applied though, edit the file /usr/share/cacti/site/includes/global.php and on line 57 (on mine anyway) and modify it to

$config['url_path'] = ‘/cacti/’;

The patching proces changes that to $config['url_path'] = ‘/’; which means all the graphics disappears etc. which is obviously not good !

That should be it… one thing to note is so far the CLI tools for cacti are not in the Ubuntu package. Dead simple to add these. Just download the 0.8.7a tarball from cacti.net and extract it somewhere. Inside it is a cli directory, that can be just copied into the /usr/share/cacti/site folder and you can add graphs, hosts etc. via the CLI tools.

Enjoy… :)

Baring any omissions by me (This was done from memory)