Nagios (Part 1) – Installing Nagios 4 on FreeBSD 10.1

Nagios is one of the popular network and systems monitoring tool available. There are two main flavours of Nagios, Nagios XI the enterprise software and Nagios-Core the “Open-Source” version. This post serves as a tutorial on setting it up on FreeBSD 10.1-Release that runs inside a vSphere environment.

Update FreeBSD base system

freebsd-update fetch
freebsd-update install

Get FreeBSD Ports Tree

portsnap fetch extract update

One of the strength of FreeBSD is the FreeBSD ports tree which is a huge repository of make files for installation in FreeBSD. FreeBSD ports tree are maintained by the FreeBSD ports team and they are well maintained and very much up to date. Software can be compiled from source with the use of additional flags made possible by the make system in FreeBSD. If compiling is not your cup of tea, FreeBSD 10 also has the pkg system where binary packages are download from a repository tree much like yum in RHEL/Centos and apt-get in Debian/Ubuntu.

Setting Up OpenSSL

With a handful of SSL related vulnerabilities made public this year, it is advisable to use the Ports version of OpenSSL as it is much more current as compared with the one that came with the base OS. Many applications have a dependency on OpenSSL for SSL connections, so it is advisable to install this first in a new system.

cd /usr/ports/security/openssl
make config-recursive
make install clean

In order to use the ports version of openssl we need to edit /etc/make.conf,

echo "WITH_OPENSSL_PORT=YES" >> /etc/make.conf

Configuring OpenSSL

mv /usr/bin/openssl /usr/bin/openssl.default
ln -s /usr/local/bin/openssl /usr/bin/
cp /usr/local/openssl/openssl.cnf.example /usr/local/openssl/openssl.cnf

Setting Up PortMaster

PortMaster is a tool to manage the ports that are installed on the FreeBSD system which includes easy upgrading of ports.

cd /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/portmaster
make config-recursive
make install clean

Open-VM-Tools

Although VMware freebsd tools works, VMware is always slow in the release of the tools for FreeBSD.

cd /usr/ports/emulators/open-vm-tools-nox11/
make config-recursive
make install clean

Make sure that the Open-VM-Tools works on reboot by editing the /etc/rc.conf

vmware_guest_vmblock_enable="YES"
vmware_guest_vmhgfs_enable="YES"
vmware_guest_vmmemctl_enable="YES"
vmware_guest_vmxnet_enable="YES"
vmware_guestd_enable="YES"

Vim-Lite

We all need our favourite text editor to configure Nagios and other configuration files.

cd /usr/ports/editors/vim-lite
make config-recursive
make install clean

edit ~/.vimrc

syntax on
set background=dark
set shiftwidth=2
set tabstop=2
set nocompatible
set expandtab
set autoindent
set ruler
if has("autocmd")
 filetype plugin indent on
endif
set showcmd " Show (partial) command in status line.
set showmatch " Show matching brackets.
set ignorecase " Do case insensitive matching
set smartcase " Do smart case matching
set incsearch " Incremental search
set hidden " Hide buffers when they are abandoned
set backspace=indent,eol,start
set mouse=

SSMTP

Refer to this article to setup an authenticated system email with Gmail.

Web Server

Nagios has a web based dashboard to provide an overview of the state of the monitored machines.

Install Apache24
cd /usr/ports/www/apache24
make config-recursive
make install clean
vim /etc/rc.conf
apache24_enable=yes

Install PHP 5.6

cd /usr/ports/lang/php56
make config-recursive
make install clean

Install PHP56-extensions

cd /usr/ports/lang/php56-extensions
make config-recursive
make install clean

Install PHP56 Apache module

cd /usr/ports/www/mod_php56
make config-recursive
make install clean

Edit httpd.conf to insert the following to the configuration file

<FilesMatch ".php$">
    SetHandler application/x-httpd-php
</FilesMatch>
<FilesMatch ".phps$">
    SetHandler application/x-httpd-php-source
</FilesMatch>

cp /usr/local/etc/php.ini-production /usr/local/etc/php.ini
cd /usr/ports/net-mgmt/nagios4
make config-recursive
make install clean

Ensure that mod_cgi is enabled in /usr/local/etc/apache24/httpd.conf by uncommenting the following line

LoadModule cgi_module libexec/apache24/mod_cgi.so

Restart the apache service to check if nagios is accessible.

More about the installation and configuration of Nagios to follow. 🙂