Nagios, FreeBSD, and nconf

I just noticed nconf on the Nagios.org site the other day. Another GUI for configuration. Anyway, I was building a new VM for use by our consultants to run nagios, RT, and cacti, and I figured I would give it a shot.

Nconf is yet another web frontend for the configuration of Nagios. It seems to work okay. It's PHP based. It's not in the ports tree, but then again, it hasn't been around very long. Here's what I did to install it:

1. install nagios, apache, php5, php5-extensions, mysql (It can't use PostgreSQL at this point) etc.

2. Create an appropriate php5.ini in /usr/local/etc and make sure it contains at least:

short_open_tag = On
register_globals = Off
magic_quotes_gpc = Off

3. untar nconf into /usr/local/www/apache22/data/nconf

4. cd to that dir

chown www config output temp

5. sudo mysql (-p if you have a root password set at this point, if not it's a good idea)

CREATE DATABASE nconf;
GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, ALTER, DROP on nconf.* to 'nconf_user'@'localhost' identified by 'difficult_password';
flush privileges;


6. add www to nagios group

7. restart apache (I also had to add:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .htm .html
AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

to /usr/local/etc/apache22/httpd.conf)

8. Browse to http://your-host-ip-or-name/nconf and go through the setup (set the path to nagios to be /usr/local/bin/nagios)

9. remove INSTALL.php and the INSTALL directory in nconf

10. Download the default imagepak-base.tar.tar from here.)

11. rename the image pack to imagepak-base.tar.gz

12. cd /usr/local/www/nagios/images/logos
sudo gunzip /path/to/the/imagepak.tar.gz
sudo tar -xf /path/to/the/imagepak.tar

The base install is done.

It will generate a tarball with the configs in /usr/local/www/apache22/data/nconf/output. You'll need to untar it into /usr/local/etc/nagios and configure nagios.conf to parse the directories for configs.

I hope the project lasts. There have certainly been a lot of webguis for Nagios that have died. Hopefully, they will add the ability to import existing configs at some point.