Running mrtg on FreeBSD

[Glenn Dawson]

At 03:33 PM 11/26/2005, matt . wrote:
>Heya folks,
>
>I hope this question isn't too MRTG-centric in-so-far-as I should be posting
>it to the MRTG list (which I have and received no response)....
>
>My quandry:
>
>I don't want MRTG run as root, however creating a crontab in /var/cron for
>the mrtg user yeilds errors every time it tries to run.
>
>mrtg user entry:
>
>mrtg:*:10103:10103::0:0:MRTG Stats Collector:/nonexistent:/sbin/nologin
>
>mrtg directory permissions:
>
>cd /usr/local/etc
>drwxr-xr-x   2 mrtg   wheel     512 Nov 23 15:10 mrtg
>
>My output directory:
>drwxr-xr-x  2 mrtg  wheel  512 Nov 23 14:18 mrtg
>
>crontab entry:
>
>*/5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/mrtg /usr/local/etc/mrtg/mrtg.cfg
>
>Error:
>
>2005-11-24 17:55:00 -- Started mrtg with config
>'/usr/local/etc/mrtg/mrtg.cfg'
>2005-11-24 17:55:00 -- Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or
>string at /usr/local/bin/mrtg line 720.
>2005-11-24 17:55:00 -- Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or
>string at /usr/local/bin/mrtg line 720.
>2005-11-24 17:55:00 -- ERROR: Can't Execute '/rateup'

The line above indicates your problem.  mrtg is looking for rateup in 
/ instead of /usr/local/bin which is where it would normally be.

Did you install mrtg from ports?

You might want to try running mrtg with --debug=cfg,dir and see if 
that gives an indication of why it can't find the rateup binary.

-Glenn


>If I run the same cron job as root, it works just dandy.  Even O'Reilly's
>"Essential SNMP" states it's not necessary to run mrtg as root:
>
>Quote from section 13.1:
>
>"The next step is to make sure MRTG runs every five minutes. There's no need
>for MRTG to be run by root; any user will do. Add a line like the following
>to the *crontab* entry for the appropriate user."
>
>I've experienced this problem on 4.11 and 6.0.  I have seen it working on
>another 4.11 box, however I can't figure out how they did it :-/
>
>Is there perhaps something FreeBSD-specific I'm overlooking?  thanks!
>
>kind regards,
>
>matt
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