2.0b2 fresh install- problems I found

[Ross Becker]

Hello,
  I did a fresh install of nagios 2.0b2, and encountered some issues. 
Most of them were fairly minor, but I wanted to report them to the 
developers so they might be addressed.

1.  the "INSTALLING" file tells you to give the configure command 
"--with-nagios-grp" for the group to use for nagios. The correct form is 
"--with-nagios-group".
2. The minimal.cfg-sample has the contact_groups directive within the 
hostgroup definition instead of the host definition, so it does not work 
"out of the box".

3. The daemon startup script  "/etc/sbin/nagios" assumes that whichever 
username you start nagios under is the same as the group you run nagios 
under, and attempts to chown the run file for the service to 
username:username.  If you configured nagios to use a different 
groupname than username, this will produce errors.
4. The daemon startup script also goes awry if the daemon fails to start 
because of a configuration error- it attempts to run "ps -p $NagiosPID", 
and if the daemon failed to start, there is nothing in  $NagiosPID- the 
end result is you get an error message from PS instead of an error that 
the daemon failed to start.  This is on SuSE 9.1, so it may be related 
to the OS and the flavor of ps on SuSE.

The last issue I've encountered so far is actually related to the order 
of the documentation.  Because I was doing a first time install, I was 
following the documentation.  I used the minimal.cfg in order to get a 
basic version of things up and running, but when I went to the web 
interface, I got an error from all of the cgi's about not being able to 
load the object configuration because of issue #2 above. Unfortunately, 
that's the ONLY error message it gives. Not until I gave up on the web 
interface and moved on to configuring the daemon did I get an entry in 
the log file that told me what was wrong with the object configuration.  
I think either more detailed error reporting is needed in the web 
interface, or CGI's need to be able to write errors to a log file, or 
the documentation order ought to be changed, because that one kept me 
stumped for a while.

Cheers
  Ross


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