The Network Administrator

As an alternative to more costly software monitoring  solutions this is free, Nagios provides the means to monitor windows and linux servers and other equipment such as

• Monitoring Windows machines
• Monitoring Linux/Unix machines
• Monitoring Netware servers
• Monitoring routers/switches
• Monitoring network printers
• Monitoring publicly available services (HTTP, FTP, SSH, etc.)

To keeps things simple I chose to install Nagios on Open SuSE 11.2 http://software.opensuse.org/112/en. Just go through a typical install, make sure that you install apache2 or httpd (Fedora) and C/C++ development libraries. Also I like to change the default run level from 5 to 3 so that you can put the memory toward the server and not toward the GUI interface. I would also recommend enabling SSH to manager the server.  For the most part you will be modifying conf files and managing the server from http://nagios_server_IP/nagios. Once you have your monitoring server operating system built in my case I chose OpenSuSE, follow these simple steps….

As a quick note, step 1, I had an issue with these commands…..
/usr/sbin/usermod -a -G nagcmd nagios

/usr/sbin/usermod -a -G nagcmd wwwrun

so, instead I used….

/usr/sbin/usermod  -G nagcmd nagios
/usr/sbin/usermod  -G nagcmd wwwrun

 Also one more note, after two installs the status map has not worked. I am running OpenSuSE, to fix this problem I did the following.

Make sure these packages are installed.

http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/quickstart-opensuse.html

http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/quickstart-fedora.html

http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/quickstart-ubuntu.html

Debian/ubuntu

apt-get install

libgd

libgd-devel

libpng

libpng-devel

libjpeg

libjpeg-devel

zlib

zlib-devel

Fedora /centos/RHEL/opensuse

Use  yum install Or yast2 -i

gd

gd-devel

png

png-devel

jpeg

jpeg-devel

zlib

zlib-devel

While in the Nagios directory run the following commands. IF YOU ARE RUNNING RUNNING THESE COMMANDS ON AN EXISTING INSTALL YOU WILL LOSE DATA, SO PLEASE MAKE A COPY OF YOU CONFIG FILES.