Cheshire Cat Computing

I'm in the process of migrating my MRTG instance from 32-bit Ubuntu to 64-bit Centos. Things are working but there are some differences in how the graphs are drawn on the Centos system that make the graphs look off.

Ubuntu 9.10
Perl 5.10.0
RRDtool 1.4.2
Routers 2.20


CentOS 5.4
Perl 5.8.8
RRDtool 1.4.3
Routers 2.20


As you can see, other than the obvious missing data on the second image, that there's some subtle differences and formatting problems. For instance, the legend for outgoing traffic shows a blue square instead of a blue line, and the text is also on the wrong line. Likewise, the maxbytes legend is also a square instead of a line. The font is different but I'm OK with that - just mostly concerned with the formatting of the legend.

Any idea what I'm doing wrong? Am I using an old version of some other library? Is there that much of a difference between 1.4.2 and 1.4.3? Is it the perl version difference?

TIA,
Eric Brander

A couple more examples where the difference is not quote so subtle:

Old System:


New System:

My guess is it is that RRDTool 1.4.3 has a slight formatting bug... this is the bleeding-edge version, I think.

This is the first time Ive seen the RRD 1.4.x output - I like the way lines have a differrent legend key.

I'd suggest downgrading the new system to RRD 1.4.2 and seeing if this fixes it.

_________________
Steve Shipway
UNIX Systems, ITSS, University of Auckland, NZ
Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning... -- Isaiah 5:11

Thanks for the reply. However, I have downgraded to 1.4.2 and that did not have any effect. Do you think it could be one of the other tools like freetype?

I completely re-installed 1.4.3 since 1.4.2 had the same issue. I also followed the rrdbuild instructions to the letter, reinstalling all dependency applications as well. Still the same problem.

One thing I didn't realize before is that ~some~ graphs are not having the issue but I can't figure out why.

The problem is definitely in either RRDTool or the freetype libraries; the positioning of the text in the output is completely wrong, and its not possible to make it like that deliberately using normal RRDTool commands.

Since a downgrade of RRDTool hasn't helped, my next guess would be the freetype libraries. Harder to change, I know

I've never yet tested Routers2 with the 1.4.x RRDTool libraries, but I can't see how the gprint statements could cause this effect.

You might want to run with the debug=yes flag set in the routers2.conf and post a copy of the exact RRDTool options list (this appears in the comments of the page when in debug mode) which might help identify any embedded character string which might have become magic in the new version of freetype. Also, have you enabled pango (pango=yes) in the routers2.conf? If so, try disabling it.

Once Im back to work I'll install 1.4.x on the dev box here and see what it looks like.

_________________
Steve Shipway
UNIX Systems, ITSS, University of Auckland, NZ
Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning... -- Isaiah 5:11

This is really weird, and I definitely need to have a 1.4.x installation to test with and try and duplicate.

Is it possible you have tab characters embedded in the cfg file labels? Maybe this version of RRDtool or freetype handles them differrently when it hits a \g?

Steve

_________________
Steve Shipway
UNIX Systems, ITSS, University of Auckland, NZ
Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning... -- Isaiah 5:11

OMG. Windows CRLF was the culprit. I have no idea how it happened - the source files had Unix format, and somehow some of them changed. Must have been my editor program or something.

Sorry for wasting your time. The reference to tabs tipped me off to look though so thanks for the hint!

Thanks for letting me know -- seems that later versions of the typeface library must be handling control characters differrently. This is worth remembering as it may affect many other windows users once they move to RRD 1.4.x

Steve

_________________
Steve Shipway
UNIX Systems, ITSS, University of Auckland, NZ
Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning... -- Isaiah 5:11