I finally got cacti [1] 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 [2] (hmm, it seems that on that particular system pkg-config, which the configure script for rrdtool [3] requires, doesn't bother looking in /usr/local for stuff by default; I suppose I could file a bug with the OS (Operating System) 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 Micro[DELETED-shaft-DELETED]soft Windows that's the problem …
[2] http://pkg-config.freedesktop.org/