* * * * *
                                        
                               My head es splode
                                        
One last bit of unfinished business from yesterday's switch installation [1]—
setting up Cacti [2] to monitor the network usage.

But I should know better than to use a package manager [3] to install
required packages, but hey, I was a bit frazzled [4] at this point.

I know that Cacti requires the use of RRDTool [5], and knowing that just
doing the straightforward yum install rrd would never work, I did the next
best thing:

[root@netmon ~]# yum search rrd
Searching Packages: 
Setting up repositories
update                    100% |=========================|  951 B    00:00     
base                      100% |=========================| 1.1 kB    00:00     
addons                    100% |=========================|  951 B    00:00     
extras                    100% |=========================| 1.1 kB    00:00     
Reading repository metadata in from local files


gpg-pubkey.None                          443e1821-421f218f      installed       
Matched from:
—–BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK—–
Version: rpm-4.3.3 (beecrypt-3.0.0)
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=
=Qsai
—–END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK—–

[root@netmon ~]# 

What the—

Okay, try a more focused search:

-----[ shell ]-----
[root@netmon ~]# yum search rrdtool
Searching Packages: 
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
No Matches found
[root@netmon ~]# 
-----[ END OF LINE ]-----

Why did I even bother with the package manager?

So it's off to manually track down dependencies.

About an hour later, I finally get around to installing Cacti 0.8.6h (yes
yes, I know they're up to 0.8.6i but I had the 0.8.6h tarball handy). It goes
pretty smoothly, except that it's not generating any graphs. I run the cron
job by hand, and yes, it's polling data from the network devices. Everything
else is running smoothly.

Just no pretty pictures of network usage.

A few hours of pointless activity go by (I even inlist the help of Wlofie [6]
to see if I may have overlooked something) when I check the instance of Cacti
we're running at The Office against the one I installed. We're running
0.8.6g. I happen to have the tarball of that handy.

I install that.

It works. I get pretty pictures.

A blood vessel in my brain explodes.

I'm found lying in a pool of my own blood, dead.

Oh wait! This isn't for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) [7] …

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2006/11/01.3
[2] http://www.cacti.net/
[3] http://clusty.com/search?query=package+manager&host=boston.conman.org&tb=sitesearch-site&sa=+Search+
[4] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2006/11/02.1
[5] http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/
[6] http://wlofie.dyndns.org/
[7] http://www.nanowrimo.org/

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

.