I wanted to get a web accessible graph of system temperature from my server. There are a variety of methods, many building on top of the brilliant RRDtool package. Since it seemed to simplify configuration, I decided to try Cacti.
Cacti is available as a standard install package on SuSE (provided you have the DVD version of 9.3 Professional, the FTP tree is not fully populated yet).
Cacti installation instructions, manual, an installation walkthrough and a forum are all available, but none are quite correct for SuSE. I don't feel this is the fault of the documentation maintainers, the SuSE system is set up to allow the addition of many packages without editing central configuration files through the extensive use of included files and directories, no package maintainers can reasonably be expected to maintain instructions for every combination. This is really the job of the community: to document installs to help others.
The SuSE install bungs everything into /usr/share/cacti and also adds a file to the /etc/apache2/conf.d directory, which should be imported automatically by apache to set up the aliasing, so no links or copies into /srv/www/htdocs/ should be necessary.
It also adds /etc/cron.d/cacti so that crontab modification is not necessary.
However, the install doesn't get everything right. The following is based on a synthesis of the above instructions, and works for me !