Nagios - installation

This story begins with a RedHat ES 5 machine, and, as all stories begin ~ Once upon a time...

I downloaded the latest stable release of Nagios core, Plug-ins and Addons from Here (http://www.nagios.org/download), which, at the time this story began the latest stable release was 3.2.0.

Look for the download button , or, something that looks like that, otherwise, you might be filling out a form for something else. Silly open source folks, go figure...

  • Save the file on your local system somewhere.



    I saved my download in a folder on my Desktop named "nagios 3.2.0"
    (Z:\Documents and Settings\JaneDoe\Desktop\nagios 3.2.0>).

  • FTP the gzipped tarball to the Nagios server (highilghted in the image below).


    The steps in the screen shot above are:

    - FTP to your Nagios server.
    - Login as the root user.
    - Enter the root password.
    - Change directories to /usr/local.
    - Use binary mode for the file transfer.
    - Upload the file with the "put" command.
    - Exit FTP with the "bye" command.


  • Now telnet, or, ssh into the Nagios server (nagiosserver) as the root user.
  • Change directories to /usr/local (cd /usr/local).
  • Uncompress the upload file (gzip -d nagios-3.2.0.tar.gz).
  • Untar the upload file (tar xvf nagios-3.2.0.tar).
  • Create a symbolic link from /usr/local/nagios-3.2.0 to /usr/local/nagios
    (ln -s /usr/local/nagios-3.2.0 /usr/local/nagios)
  • Change directories to the nagios source directory (cd nagios).
  • Execute the configure script (./configure --prefix=/usr/local/nagios).

    And, if all went well with the configure script, you'll see output like below:



  • Now, execute "make all" as the output says to do.



  • Now, execute "make install" to install Nagios.



  • Now, you can execute the rest of the make commands to get things up and running, as seen in the image below:

    * make install-init ~ This installs the init scripts in /etc/init.d

    * make install-commandmode ~ This installs and configures permissions on the directory holding the external command file.

    * make install-config ~ This sample configuration files.



    Now, startup up the Nagios core server with the /etc/init.d/nagios script, like:

    /etc/init.d/nagios start

    You can confirm thigs are up and running with a process check (ps -ef|grep nagios).



    Then launch a browser and connect to your Nagios instance (http://nagiosserver/nagios).

    Now, you can start adding devices to monitor...