Cacti stopped working after upgrade to Stretch

Question

Just upgraded a cacti server to Stretch/Debian 9. Cacti was still working after the upgrade was finished.

After cleaning up the leftover Debian 8 PHP 5 packages, that left only PHP 7.0 installed, cacti stopped working, giving only a blank page when accessing the URL.

Calling /usr/share/cacti/site/index.php from the command line gives the error:

PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function mysql_pconnect() in /usr/share/php/adodb/drivers/adodb-mysql.inc.php:480

What to do to make it work?

Answer 1

mysql_pconnect is obsolete by now, and not supported by PHP 7.0.

Changed the database_type in the cacti configuration file /etc/cacti/debian.php as in:

From:

$database_type = "mysql";

to:

$database_type = "mysqli";

Cacti is now working.

From: http://php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-pconnect.php

This extension was deprecated in PHP 5.5.0, and it was removed in PHP 7.0.0. Instead, the MySQLi or PDO_MySQL extension should be used.