Nagios

Installaton

Preparing for Installation

Install required Linux components.

yum install httpd gcc glibc glibc-common gd gd-devel

Create an account for nagios to use.

useradd nagios
passwd nagios

Create a new nagcmd group for allowing external commands to be submitted through the web interface. Add both the nagios user and the apache user to the group.

groupadd nagcmd
usermod -G nagcmd nagios
usermod -G nagcmd apache

Downloading nagios

Create an area to download required nagios files.

mkdir /usr/src/nagios
cd /usr/src/nagios

The latest relase of nagios at time of writing is 2.9. For the latest relase visit http://www.nagios.org/download/

wget http://optusnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/nagios/nagios-2.9.tar.gz

Now download the latest nagios plugins. Visit http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=29880 for the latest releases. Version 1.4.9.1 is the latest at time of writing.

wget http://optusnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/nagiosplug/nagios-plugins-1.4.9.tar.gz

Extract the Nagios source code tarball.

tar xzf nagios-2.9.tar.gz
cd nagios-2.9

Run the Nagios configure script, passing the name of the group you created earlier like so:

./configure --with-command-group=nagcmd

Compile the Nagios source code.

make all

Install binaries, init script, sample config files and set permissions on the external command directory.

make install
make install-init
make install-config
make install-commandmode

Don’t start Nagios yet - there’s still more that needs to be done...

Setup Alert Email Address

Sample configuration files have now been installed in the /usr/local/nagios/etc directory. These sample files should work fine for getting started with Nagios. You’ll need to make just one change before you proceed... Edit the /usr/local/nagios/etc/objects/contacts.cfg config file with your favorite editor and change the email address associated with the nagiosadmin contact definition to the address you’d like to use for receiving alerts.

nano /usr/local/nagios/etc/objects/contacts.cfg

Configure the Web Interface

Install the Nagios web config file in the Apache conf.d directory.

make install-webconf

Create a nagiosadmin account for logging into the Nagios web interface. Remember the password you
assign to this account - you’ll need it later.

htpasswd -c /usr/local/nagios/etc/htpasswd.users nagiosadmin
Restart Apache to make the new settings take effect.
service httpd restart