Cacti exercises - basic 
AfNOG 11, Kigali 

All these exercises can and should be combined or altered to your wishes. Feel free to ignore them and just play with cacti, but these are a few hints on what you can try out. If you want to try something completely new and different, go to the advanced exercises


1. If you haven’t done it yet start graphing the backbone router’s interfaces as shown in the slides (use 196.200.218.254 as IP)


2. Now add also graphs for the errors/discards to the same page for the backbone router. Select “Errors/Discards” from the dropdown menu when adding graphs and select the Up/Interfaces again. They should be automatically added to the existing Host Tree


3. Now add more devices and graphs for the all five workgroup routers (196.200.218.249/250/251/252/253) going through similar steps. 
   * Add interface graphs for them 
   * Make a page containing the uplink interface (to the AFNOG-GW) from all five of these routers. For this go to Graph Trees, select your tree and Add 
   * First add a header and call it “All uplinks Daily” 
   * Now you should see the header and an “Add” link next to that, there you can add graphs under that page. Select this and add a graph, with the uplink interface from one workgroup router (with IP 196.200.218.249), and select Daily (5 min). 
   * Add all 5 workgroup routers like this. 
   * You can also add another page with all the weekly graphs (although you might not see a lot happening there during the course as it only updates every hour) 
   * You can also add the switches if you want (see network diagram). IPs are 196.200.218.29/61/93/125/157


   * To make some more interesting graphs transfer some data. Copy some files to one of the other workstations, e.g.: 
      * scp /boot/initrd* afnog@196.200.218.x:/tmp (select x 1-10,33-42,65-74,97-106,129-138 from the diagram) 
      * PLEASE  only copy into the /tmp directory of the remote machine and don’t fill the harddisk 
      * After a few minutes you might see a change in graphs 
      * or ping big packets to one of the PCs: ping -i0.2 -s 1500 196.200.218.x 
      * Please don’t run that to the outside world, it will fill our Internet connection quickly


      * You can add PCs as well, they all should have a SNMP daemon running as well. When you add them as devices, don’t select “Cisco Router” as a template, but add SNMP with community afnog 
      * Try to remember to take a look at the graphs tomorrow morning