Support FAQ

FAQ

Where can I download Nagios?

The Nagios server software is available for most major distributions of Linux using the standard package management tools. Your distribution will have documentation available on how to install Nagios. This is usually the quickest and simplest way to get up and running.

You will need the core Nagios server package, and at least one of the NRPE or NSCA add-ons. NSCA is required to utilize the alerting features of the Opengear distributed hosts, installing both NRPE and NSCA is recommended.

You will also require a web server such as Apache to display the Nagios web UI (and this may be installed automatically as a dependency of the Nagios packages).

Alternatively, you may wish to download the Nagios source code directly from the Nagios website nagios.org and build and install the software from scratch. The Nagios website (http://www.nagios.org) has several Quick Start Guides that walk through this process.

The Nagios server can also be installed as an application or as a virtual appliance e.g you can use the official Ubuntu VMWare virtual appliance:
- Unzip it and add it as a virtual machine to VMWare server
- This will work pretty much out of the box (except the MAC address changing confuses udev and you end up with no eth0 which you can fix by editing /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules)
- There's a good walk-through at the Nagios site on installing the latest Nagios

Opengear's SDT for Nagios requires a central Nagios server running Nagios 2.x or 3.x. Nagios 1.x is not supported.

How do I download and run Opegear's SDT for Nagios wizard?

Once you have installed and configured the Nagios central server you should then configure all the remote console servers for Nagios support. Then you are ready to run the SDT for Nagios Configuration Wizard on the central Nagios server.

The primary function of the wizard is to connect to each console server and import configuration into the central Nagios server. This effectively adds the hosts and service checks you set up on the distributed Opengear console servers into your central Nagios server. The wizard is a Linux command line script, and can be downloaded from http://www.opengear.com/download.html. To install:

Copy or download the wizard to the central Nagios server then open a command line terminal. Change directory to the location of the wizard and ensure the wizard script is executable by executing chmod +x sdtnagios-config. Also ensure you are running as a user with write permissions to Nagios configuration and web UI files and directories, and execute the wizard script, e.g. ./sdtnagios-config
The wizard will prompt you for the location of some Nagios configuration files (with the option to search), and the IP addresses and login credentials of the distributed Opengear console servers
After the distributed configuration has been imported, the wizard will ask if you want to apply Opengear SDT for Nagios UI theme. This is not required, and simply changes the look and feel of the Nagios UI
Once the wizard has completed successfully, verify the Nagios configuration is valid as instructed, and restart Nagios. If you chose to apply the SDT for Nagios theme, you may need to flush your browser’s cache for it to display correctly
Login to the SDT for Nagios web UI on the central Nagios server and select Service Detail from the Monitoring menu to see the imported hosts and service checks

Note: the wizard keeps a backup copy of each file it modifies, it displays the name of each of these backup files as it runs. If you wish to roll back the changes made by the wizard, simply move these files to their original names. Otherwise once you are satisfied with the new configuration, you may remove the backup files.