Cacti & Thomson ST516

Now, in most cases, the Thomson ST516 would take the default IP of 192.168.1.254, and provides DHCP IPs in the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet. So, start up your telnet client, and connect to 192.168.1.254; the default username is "Administrator" and the password is just blank. Once logged in, you will get the "_{Administrator}=>" prompt, and here you should type in "menu" (without the quotes) and you will be presented with the menu as shown in the screenshot.

The menu can be navigated using the arrow keys on your keyboard, and then use [TAB] (the tab key on your keyboard that is) to switch to the OK/Cancel options to make your choice. If you need to go back up a folder, just choose the ".." option (those familiar with FTP should recognize that).

Now for Cacti ... I chose cacti, cause i found it to be most easy to configure and had a good front/back end. There are various RRDTools that you can try, but I won't go into those details here. You can download Cacti from, www.cacti.net. The requirements for cacti aren't extreme by any means,

-RRDTool 1.0.49 or 1.2.x or greater
-MySQL 4.1.x or 5.x or greater
-PHP 4.3.6 or greater, 5.x greater highly recommended for advanced features
-A Web Server e.g. Apache or IIS

I use Ubuntu 10.10 currently, but I have followed the same instructions for Ubuntu 9.10, and Ubuntu 10.04 as well. I won't venture to say how it would react under older versions of Ubuntu, but as you can see below, things should work. I take NO responsibilities for the result of any of the tasks listed below, I am just outlining the steps that I followed which resulted in success for me.

From a terminal window, type in the following commands to prepare your system to accept Cacti.

sudo apt-get install php5 php5-gd php5-mysql

Once that is done, you wan to install cacti,

sudo apt-get install cacti-spine

This will probably prompt you a few times, here is what I answered by default (make sure you read each prompt carefully and decide for yourself!)

-Configuring libphp-adodb option select ok and press Enter to Continue.
-I chose apache2 as my webserver when asked.
-I allowed it to configure the database for cacti, so I chose yes.
-It asked for the root password for the MySQL database so that it can make the necessary changes.
-I gave it a default password for cacti to use with MySQL, if I had left this blank it would have chosen one by random and I would have to go look in the config files of cacti to see what it had put.
-I confirmed my default password for cacti to use with MySQL.

Once all of that is done, you just point your browser to http://serverip/cacti (replace serverip with the appropriate server IP address, and if you are using the machine that cacti is installed on you can just use "localhost" (without the quotes) as the serverip. Follow the instructions, and prompts on the web-interface and your install is done! It really is very straightforward.

Once you have logged in, you will the three options on the right (Create a device, create a graph, view your graphs) ... just follow each one in that order, and then once you have created your graphs wait about 15mins to view your graph. Why the 15mins? Cause Cacti will get the information from your ST516 every 5 mins (by default) and its always the current information, no historical information is provided to Cacti. Actually that is why you are using Cacti, so that you can keep track of it for historical purposes!

Let me know how your Cacti and ST516 combinations work out ... see an example of what the result looks like below.