2.0b2 fresh install- problems I found

[Andreas Ericsson]

Ross Becker wrote:
> 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.
> 

These are all fairly minor issues and since Nagios 2 is still beta (i.e. 
Addressed to developers or people handy with such problems) I believe 
this goes under the "expect this while in beta" category. Still nice to 
report it though. Those of us who autofix such things faster than it 
would take to submit a report on it usually forget that the problem ever 
existed.

> 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.
> 

You're ofcourse welcome to contribute to the project. Cleanly appliable 
patches (preferrably in unified diff format, I believe) submitted to 
this list usually gets sucked up by Ethan pretty fast.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Lead Developer


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