Wednesday, May 13, 2009
The good news is, I've got the source code! The bad news is, I'm debugging someone else's PHP application!
I finally got cacti installed on one of our
client's firewalls (we're now managing their network, and they've been
having “issues” with their network). It only required
installing four packages from source, and troubleshooting pkg-config (hmm, it
seems that on that particular system pkg-config, which the
configure script for rrdtool requires, doesn't
bother looking in /usr/local for stuff by default; I suppose I
could file a bug with the OS
vendor, but the answer from them would be “OH MY GOD, MAGNUM!
YOU'RE USING WHAT VERSION? THAT'S FROM BEFORE THE DINOSAURS ROAMED THE
EARTH! DON'T EVEN LOOK AT US UNTIL YOU'VE INSTALLED THE LATEST UNTESTED
VERSION OF OUR DISTRIBUTION AND EVEN THEN, YOU'LL BE TWENTY MINUTES OBSOLETE
SO WE STILL WON'T TALK TO YOU!” because we're using a
distribution that's what? A year old? Two? Well before the Earth roamed
the Earth, so to speak <eyeroll/>—not that I'm
bitter or anything) only to find cacti not working.
Well, it did work. cacti was gathering statistics, it just
wasn't bothering to graph the results, which is rather important.
Great! I get to debug 71,000 lines of PHP! O frabjous day!
Callooh! Callay! (I think I'm bitter because I had to write a C program to
determine if the error was coming from PHP or
rrdtool—sheesh!)
But I found the issue (an errant == instead of
!=), and now it's drawing pretty graphs and we get to show the
client that the network is working smoothly, it's Microshaftsoft
Windows that's the problem …
