Running mrtg on FreeBSD

[matt .]

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'

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