I decided to install in RedHat 5.2. Maybe it is easier in Ubuntu (Nagios 3 already listed in the repository, but I haven’t tried it). As pointed out by the quickstart (it is meant for Fedora by the way), requirements are:

1. php, httpd
2. gcc, glibc, glibc-common
3. gd, gd-devel

After getting those, the configure-make-install procedure runs well, except that I don’t check the warnings. It turns out that only some of Nagios core components are installed. It can be seen from the content of /usr/local/nagios/libexec directory. There is no check_snmp etc. Error also appears in statusmap page of Nagios.

Compile More Nagios Core Components

I run through ./configure once more, check out all warnings, and begin to evaluate requirements (found this text inside nagios-plugins-1.4.14 tarball)

MySQL

For check_mysql functionality, mysql (MySQL client for linux) must be installed. ./configure also test this client, by default config, to the local MySQL socket, hence mysql-server must also exist.

Radius Client

Client from freeradius package doesn’t meet Nagios requirements. It must be the ones from original radiusclient, I found RPMs for radiusclient-0.3.2-0.2.el5.rf.i386.rpm and radiusclient-devel-0.3.2-0.2.el5.rf.i386.rpm.

GD

It is quite tricky to get statusmap.c to be compiled for the .cgi of Nagios status map. Compilation needs gd library from http://www.libgd.org/. gd requires zlib, libjpeg, and libpng. On first attempt, I installed from RPMs. This appeared to be not working as I could still see warnings about gd2 during ./configure.

So, I choose to compile from the source gd-2.0.33.tar.bz2. This tarball was found in the older section of current gd2 web. I chose this version because the RPM used was gd-2.0.33-9.4.el5_1.1.rpm. I removed this RPM first which made me to remove also libmwf and ImageMagick.

After straightforward  configure-make-install the library will be installed under /usr/local/lib i.e libgd.so.2.0.0. Header files will also be available in /usr/local/include i.e gd.h. These are different from the situation when I installed from RPM where libgd.so.2.0.0 is under /usr/lib/ and no gd.h found under /usr/include.

So, I make devclean and rerun

./configure --with-gd-lib=/usr/local/lib --with-gd-inc=/usr/local/include --with-command-group=nagcmd

I configure the /usr/local/nagios/etc/cgi.conf but status map page is still empty. Next workaround is to install back  gd-2.0.33-9.4.el5_1.1.rpm. (which also bring back libmwf and ImageMagick) and point the gd library to the ones created from RPM. I make devclean and rerun:

./configure --with-gd-lib=/usr/lib --with-gd-inc=/usr/local/include --with-command-group=nagcmd

At this point I regret not to have Ubuntu implementation in the first place. Just a small regret.

Other library needed for check_smtp, check_http, etc. don’t seem to trouble me much, I need openssl, openldap, etc. and simply get them from RPMs.