------------------------------------------
spine: a backend data gatherer for cacti
------------------------------------------

This code represents high speed poller replacement for cmd.php.
It has come quite a ways from it's initial development.  It is almost
100% compatible with the legacy cmd.php processor and provides much
more flexibility than cmd.php.

Make sure that you have a good development environment setup to compile spine.
This includes compilers, header files and things such as libtool.  If you have
questions, use the forums.

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 presents a problem for you, I suggest using 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:

   a) main poller take one connection
   b) all threads take one connection each
   c) 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

   This may be resolved in a future release of spine.

-Larry Adams (aka TheWitness)
