Yes, it’s that time of the year again. Countless first years pack their worldy possesions into all forms of transport from small cars to huge vans (and for the international students a single suitcase) and head for university. For many it’s the first time they have spent more than a few weeks away from home, and for most the first time they are away from home for a few months.

But at each uni there is a crew of ‘experienced’ students, otherwise known as the “Freshers Crew”, to help them with that first week. Wearing bright coloured tops and greeting people in load voices they will have by now helped freshers find their room, point them in the direction of the nearest bar, shopping centre and transport links. And then gather (or drag) them up in large groups to events run each night especially for their entertainment.

That’s what I spent the last week doing anyway. A week last Friday all freshers crew met and were divided into their groups and told what we should and should not be doing for the next week. Things we should be doing included being helpful, while things we should not do was based around not getting freshers drunk and taking advantage of them.

Of course being a freshers crew isn’t without it’s perks, fast track free entry into all freshers events being the main one.

The freshers week at my uni is now over and our job is mostly complete, all that remains is to go to the evenings run during the first week of term and make sure we are seen and available if needed. A very busy week has now just ended, now rest of the term is upon us.

Of sorts. I’ve given a proposal for the final solution. It has been agreed by the team who will be using the final product, by my boss, and members of the SMT. All the people that is required. Now the purchasing just needs to happen.

For reasons I’m not alowed to explain on a public web site, the pruchase request for my project has now to be signed by the CEO. And like most CEO’s he is quite busy so this is taking some time.

When I first started this project it is one thing that I did not think about and so plan in some time for. It’s now been 3 weeks in which I would have liked to progress and have atleast 2 people using the solution.

Still I guess that’s life and it’s some thing that I’ve learnt for future projects.

I like to know how my computers are performing, Cacti enable me to do that. But installing it in Ubuntu is not as simple as it should be.

Normally a simple apt-get install $program is enough, not so in this case. To be fair apt-get does get all the packages and sorts out the dependancies, but it doesn’t install them in the correct order. So cacti fails to run. I found the following to work:

1. apt-get mysql and get that working. Create a cacti user and database.
2. apt-get apache (not apache2), get that working.
3. apt-get php and get working with apache (hint: check the httpd.conf file for the php include)
4. Get mysql working with php (hint: check the php.ini file and use a phpinfo() to check)
5. apt-get Cacti. Restart apache to pick up the cacti stuff.
6. Visit http://$server/cacti/ If you get the cacti login screen then your done.
7. If you get a page about a missing database and mysql, search the hard disk for a file called cacti.sql, and import this into mysql using the user details and the cacti database you created in step one.
8. Revisit http://$server/cacti/ again, this time you should be able to login.

If you have problems at any stage then look at the programs documentation, this post is more about the order in which you install things using apt-get.