Spine is a very fast poller engine, written in C. It is an optional replacement for cmd.php. If you decide to use it, you will have to install it explicitely. It does not come with cacti itself. The easiest way is to install Spine using rpm or ports. You will find packages for Spine at the main cacti site or from your distribution. To compile Spine, please download it to any location of your liking. Then, please issue from the downloaded directory following commands

shell>aclocal
shell>libtoolize --force  (glibtoolize --force on Max OS)
shell>autoheader
shell>autoconf
shell>automake
shell>./configure
shell>make
shell>make install

“make install” has to be run as root. On latest spine versions, there's a script called “bootstrap” that performs all this stuff; again, root permissions are required for install. Assuming, you've managed to install Spine correctly, you will have to configure it. The configuration file may be placed in the same directory as Spine itself or at /etc/Spine.conf.

DB_Host	127.0.0.1 or hostname (not localhost)
DB_Database	cacti
DB_User		cactiuser
DB_Pass 	cacti
DB_Port		3306

All other pre 0.8.6 settings are obsolete.