MySQL Cacti Templates installation

I was trying to install MySQL Cacti monitoring tool last few days. This is a cool RRDTOOL based monitoring package that can be downloaded from here.

http://code.google.com/p/mysql-cacti-templates

To get the template working, it requires Cacti to be installed. http://www.cacti.net/

Cacti is design around RRDTOOLs http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/

that in turn require many other packages installed,

pkgconfig, zlib, libpng, freetype, LibXML2, fontconfig, Pixman, Cairo, Glib, Pango

That's right every single of these packages need to downloaded, compiled and installed successfully.

The best way to enable wget for your server if you are behind a proxy, set following environment variable,

http_proxy=http://user:password@proxy2.yourcom.com:8080

Most package installation is pretty straight forward, just download the package, unzip it, configure, make and make install. I encountered some error message while compiling fontconfig, the error is

gcc -shared .libs/fcatomic.o .libs/fcblanks.o .libs/fccache.o .libs/fccfg.o .libs/fccharset.o .libs/fcdbg.o .libs/fcdefault.o .libs/fcdir.o .libs/fcfreetype.o .libs/fcfs.o .libs/fcinit.o .libs/fclang.o .libs/fclist.o .libs/fcmatch.o .libs/fcmatrix.o .libs/fcname.o .libs/fcpat.o .libs/fcserialize.o .libs/fcstr.o .libs/fcxml.o .libs/ftglue.o -Wl,--rpath -Wl,/usr/local/lib -Wl,--rpath -Wl,/usr/local/lib -L/usr/local/lib /usr/local/lib/libfreetype.so -lz -lexpat -Wl,--rpath -Wl,/usr/local/lib -Wl,-soname -Wl,libfontconfig.so.1 -o .libs/libfontconfig.so.1.2.0/usr/bin/ld: /usr/local/lib/libz.a(inflate.o): relocation R_X86_64_32 against `zcalloc' can not be used when making a shared object; recompile with -fPIC/usr/local/lib/libz.a: could not read symbols: Bad valuecollect2: ld returned 1 exit status

The error is actually because Zlib was not compiled properly. I end up recompiled Zlib with

env CFLAGS="-O3 -fPIC";./configure --shared;make;make install;

Clean the old fontconfig file, 'make clean' and recompile.

Bump into another error at final compile of RRDTOOL,

collect2: ld returned 1 exit status make[2]: *** [rrdtool] Error 1

It turns out because I skipped libxml2 installation because download link broken. Well, I hope the error message was little more informative.

Ok, next I need to make Cacti working. Which will not happen until PHP, MYSQL and Apache properly configured.
Then hit the DocumentRoot must be a directory problem, even I am pretty sure the document root is directory. This is because SELinux stopping apache taking it. This can be fixed by disable SELinux or

chcon -R -h -t httpd_sys_content_t /path/to/directory

Hit a php bug while compiling php5 with apache2. Get following error while start apache

Cannot load /etc/httpd/modules/libphp5.so into server:/etc/httpd/modules/libphp5.so: undefined symbol: zend_qsort

Have to recompile php5 with

./configure --enable-mbstring --with-mysql --with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs --with-libdir=lib64

I was not using --with-libdir=lib64 switch.

Again, php seems not working with mysql properly. I doubt checked ./configure message of php , there's an error

configure: error: Cannot find libmysqlclient

Apparently, ./configure is looking for /lib64 under mysql installation but there's not any. Linked lib to lib64. I have to reconfigure php again :(

I was struggling in the last few days to figure out why my php page refuse connecting to local mysql database. Always has error from index.php complaining something is not right in 'include/config.php' . However I am very much sure everything is correct. I wrote a quick test php code to test the database connection. The interesting thing is I can run the code from command line without problem, but when I check it from web through apache it failed with "Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket " error. It's kind of frustrating.

Finally a note from google search helped me, I changed hostname from 'localhost' to '127.0.0.1' just to check if this will work. Guess what, it worked!

Ok, run into another problem trying to compile cacti-spine-0.8.7a,

*** [Gentoo] sanity check failed! ****** libtool.m4 and ltmain.sh have a version mismatch! ****** (libtool.m4 = 1.5.22, ltmain.sh = 1.5.24) ***Please run: libtoolize --copy --force

Running libtoolize --copy --force

create another error,

libtoolize: `/usr/share/aclocal/libtool.m4' is serial 47, less than 48 in `aclocal.m4'To remain compatible, you should update your `aclocal.m4' by running aclocal.Putting files in AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR, `config'.

Having no idea what's going on here, I searched internet and the solution is

autoreconf --force --install --symlink