Note: This page is quite old and is likely out of date. My opinions may have also changed dramatically since this was written. It is here as a reference until I get around to updating it.

yum install nagios nagios-plugins httpd nagios-plugins-load \
  nagios-plugins-users nagios-plugins-http nagios-plugins-ping \
  nagios-plugins-ssh nagios-plugins-procs nagios-plugins-disk \
  nagios-plugins-smtp nagios-plugins-dns nagios-plugins-tcp -y

rm -f /etc/httpd/conf.d/welcome.conf

There is also an undeclared depedency:

yum install perl-Text-ParseWords -y

htpasswd -c /etc/nagios/passwd nagiosadmin

Updates are going to be handled by yum exclusively, so the first change is adjusting check_for_updates=1 to 0, and for good measure bare_update_check=0 to 1 in /etc/nagios/nagios.cfg.

systemctl enable httpd.service
systemctl enable nagios.service
systemctl start httpd.service
systemctl start nagios.service

I had a strange issue where the ping plugin wasn't working with an error like "CRITICAL - Could not interpret output from ping command" the solution was to give the setuid bit to the ping program like so:

chmod u+s /usr/bin/ping

Next steps:

  • Investigate using nginx instead of apache
  • Setup nagios to be the root of apache
  • Add SSL to apache
  • Add a port forward through to nagios

Permission Fixing

In the event all the editing goo breaks nagios's ability to access files I wrote the following quick little script to fix the various ownerships and permissions.

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13

#!/bin/bash

# Fix the ownership of the various directories
chown root:root /etc/nagios
chown -R root:nagios /etc/nagios/*
chown root:apache /etc/nagios/passwd

# And fix the permissions on the various files and directories
chmod -R u=rwX,g=rX,o=rX /etc/nagios
chmod 0640 /etc/nagios/private/resource.cfg /etc/nagios/passwd

# And restore any selinux attributes on the files
restorecon -R /etc/nagios