# Spine: a poller for Cacti
---------------------------
Spine is a high speed poller replacement for `cmd.php`. It is almost 100%
compatible with the legacy cmd.php processor and provides much more
flexibility, speed and concurrency than `cmd.php`.

Make sure that you have the proper development environment to compile Spine.
This includes compilers, header files and things such as libtool. If you
have questions please consult the forums and/or online documentation.

## Unix Installation

These instructions assume the default install location for spine
of `/usr/local/spine`. If you choose to use another prefix, make
sure you update the commands as required for that new path.

To compile and install Spine using MySQL versions 5.5 or higher
please do the following:

```
./configure
make
make install
chown root:root /usr/local/spine/bin/spine
chmod +s /usr/local/spine/bin/spine
```

To compile and install Spine using MySQL versions previous to 5.5
please do the following:

```
./configure --with-reentrant
make
make install
chown root:root /usr/local/spine/bin/spine
chmod +s /usr/local/spine/bin/spine
```

## Windows Installation

### CYGWIN Prerequisite

1. Download Cygwin for Window from [https://www.cygwin.com/](https://www.cygwin.com/)
2. Install Cygwin by executing the downloaded setup program
3. Basically, select install from Internet
4. Select the installation location
5. Select a mirror which is close to your location
6. Once on the package selection section make sure to select the following:
	* autoconf
	* automake
	* gcc-core
	* gzip
	* help2man
	* libtool
	* make
	* net-snmp-devel
	* m4
	* libmysqlclient-devel
	* libmysqlclient
	* openssl-devel
	* dos2unix
	* wget
7. Wait for installation to complete, coffee time!

### Compile Spine

1. Open Cygwin shell prompt and brace yourself to use unix commands on Windows.
2. Download the Spine source to the current directory:
	[http://www.cacti.net/spine_download.php](http://www.cacti.net/spine_download.php)
3. Extract Spine:
	`tar xzvf cacti-spine-*.tar.gz`
4. Change into the Spine directory:
	`cd cacti-spine-*`
5. Run bootstrap to prepare Spine for compilation:
	`./bootstrap`
6. Follow the instruction which bootstrap outputs.
7. Update the spine.conf file for your installation of Cacti. You can optionally 
   move it to a better location if you choose to do so, make sure to copy the
   spine.conf as well.
8. Ensure that Spine runs well by running with `/usr/local/spine/spine -R -S -V 3`
9. Update Cacti `Paths` Setting to point to the Spine binary and update the 
   `Poller Type` to Spine. For the spine binary on Windows x64, and using default
   locations, that would be `C:\cygwin64\usr\local\spine\bin\spine.exe`
10. If all is good Spine will be run from the poller in place of cmd.php.

## Known Issues

1. On Windows, Microsoft does not support a TCP Socket send timeout. Therefore,
   if you are using TCP ping on Windows, spine will not perform a second or subsequent
   retries to connect and the host will be assumed down on the first failure.  

   If this is a problem it is suggested to use another Availability/Reachability
   method, or moving to Linux/UNIX.

2. Spine takes quite a few MySQL connections. The number of connections is calculated
   as follows:

   * main poller take one connection
   * all threads take one connection each
   * all script servers take one connection each

   Therefore, if you have 4 processes, with 10 threads each, and 5 script servers each
   your spine will take approximately:

   `total connections = 4 * ( 1 + 10 + 5 ) = 64`

3. On older MySQL versions, different libraries had to be used to make MySQL thread
   safe. MySQL versions 5.0 and 5.1 require this flag. If you are using these version
   of MySQL, you must use the --with-reentrant configure flag.
