I was having a hard time figuring out how to migrate Cacti from one box to another, or more specifically I could do the migration by the book but nothing was working, so after much head scratching and googling I’m going to collate my notes here. This assumes Debian to Debian, and we’ll call the boxes oldcacti and newcacti.
Step 1 is to setup Cacti, RRDTool, SNMP etc on newcacti. This is outside the scope of this post.
Step 2 is to migrate your database, so dump it, scp it to newcacti:
oldcacti:/etc/cacti# mysqldump -u cacti -p > cacti.sql
Enter password:
oldcacti:/etc/cacti# scp cacti.sql root@newcacti:/etc/cacti/
root@newcacti's password:
cacti.sql 100% 463KB 462.5KB/s 00:00
oldcacti:/etc/cacti#
and restore it:
newcacti:/etc/cacti# mysql -u cacti -p < cacti.sql
Enter password:
newcacti:/etc/cacti#
Step 3 All of your settings should now be across, but you'll likely want to keep your RRD history too. Unfortunately you cannot just scp the files across as you'll likely get complaints about the RRD files being created on a different arch:
COMMENT:From 2008/06/18 14:05:32 To 2008/06/19 14:05:32\c
ERROR: Garbage ':05:32 To 2008/06/19 14:05:32\c' after command:
COMMENT:From 2008/06/18 14:05:32 To 2008/06/19 14:05:32\c
ERROR: This RRD was created on other architecture
ERROR: This RRD was created on other architecture
ERROR: This RRD was created on other architecture
ERROR: This RRD was created on other architecture
ERROR: Garbage ':05:41 To 2008/06/19 14:05:41\c' after command:
COMMENT:From 2008/06/18 14:05:41 To 2008/06/19 14:05:41\c
ERROR: Garbage ':05:41 To 2008/06/19 14:05:41\c' after command:
So we need to export the files to xml and then reimport them:
rrdtool dump filename.rrd > filename.xml
rrdtool restore filename.xml > filename.rrd
But if you’ve got dozens, hundreds or even thousands of RRD files, doing them one by one is going to get tired, very quickly. So here we go:
oldcacti:/usr/share/cacti/site/rra/# ls -1 *.rrd | awk '{print "rrdtool dump "$1" > "$1".xml"}' | sh -x
scp *.xml root@newcacti:/usr/share/cacti/site/rra/
followed by:
newcacti:/usr/share/cacti/site/rra/# rm *.rrd
newcacti:/usr/share/cacti/site/rra/# ls -1 *.rrd.xml | sed 's/\.xml//' | awk '{print "rrdtool restore "$1".xml "$1}' | sh -x
newcacti:/usr/share/cacti/site/rra/# rm *.xml
newcacti:/usr/share/cacti/site/rra/# chown www-data:www-data *
That should be it, the final chown ensures that Apache can actually open the files and present them. Assuming Cacti et al is configured right on newcacti, you should be seeing some pretty graphs 
(С)
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