Alright here's what I did in order to get it running.
I started with a blank Ubuntu 12.04 L.T.S Server that I only installed OpenSSH and Virtual Machine Hosts through the tasksel menu during installation.
Then I followed the instructions as such (when I put a ** by something this is where I deviated a bit from Nagios installation instructions which I will include the link to; it's also a few of the comments above this one. Maybe page 2 or something on this thread.)
**link to nagios instruction set: http://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nagi ... Source.pdf
[from command line]
sudo -i
**had to split up this install command as it wasnt' working the way it was written in the docs
sudo apt-get install wget (this is already installed but just to be careful)
(sudo isn't implicitly necessary but this is the way they wrote them so I just included it; but your running as root with the sudo -i the whole time)
sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install apache2 php5-gd
sudo apt-get install libgd2-xpm libgd2-xpm-dev libapache2-mod-php5
cd /tmp
wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/sour ... 4.1.tar.gz
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/nagiosp ... .15.tar.gz
useradd nagios
groupadd nagcmd
usermod -a -G nagcmd nagios
tar zxvf nagios-3.4.1.tar.gz
tar zxvf nagios-plugins-1.4.15.tar.gz
cd nagios
**I split up the following into two commands as well, not sure why it worked this way but it did. Make sure to keep the ./configure in both.
./configure --with-nagios-group=nagios --with-command-group=nagcmd
./configure --with-mail=/usr/bin/sendmail
make all
make install
make install-init
make install-config
make install-commandmode
make install-webconf
cp -R contrib/eventhandlers/ /usr/local/nagios/libexec/
chown -R nagios:nagios /usr/local/nagios/libexec/eventhandlers
/usr/local/nagios/bin/nagios -v /usr/local/nagios/etc/nagios.cfg
**After all that you should see something similar to the following:
Nagios Core 3.4.1
Copyright (c) 2009-2011 Nagios Core Development Team and Community Contributors
Copyright (c) 1999-2009 Ethan Galstad
Last Modified: 05-11-2012
License: GPL
Website: http://www.nagios.org
Reading configuration data...
Read main config file okay...
Processing object config file '/usr/local/nagios/etc/objects/commands.cfg'...
Processing object config file '/usr/local/nagios/etc/objects/contacts.cfg'...
Processing object config file '/usr/local/nagios/etc/objects/timeperiods.cfg'...
Processing object config file '/usr/local/nagios/etc/objects/templates.cfg'...
Processing object config file '/usr/local/nagios/etc/objects/localhost.cfg'...
Read object config files okay...
Running pre-flight check on configuration data...
Checking services...
Checked 8 services.
Checking hosts...
Checked 1 hosts.
Checking host groups...
Checked 1 host groups.
Checking service groups...
Checked 0 service groups.
Checking contacts...
Checked 1 contacts.
Checking contact groups...
Checked 1 contact groups.
Checking service escalations...
Checked 0 service escalations.
Checking service dependencies...
Checked 0 service dependencies.
Checking host escalations...
Checked 0 host escalations.
Checking host dependencies...
Checked 0 host dependencies.
Checking commands...
Checked 24 commands.
Checking time periods...
Checked 5 time periods.
Checking for circular paths between hosts...
Checking for circular host and service dependencies...
Checking global event handlers...
Checking obsessive compulsive processor commands...
Checking misc settings...
Total Warnings: 0
Total Errors: 0
Things look okay - No serious problems were detected during the pre-flight check
**So now you start up Nagios
/etc/init.d/nagios start
**Set a password...this may not work (it hiccuped for me a couple times) so follow the alternate instructions if you don't see "Set password" after you issue the command
htpasswd -c /usr/local/nagios/etc/htpasswd.users nagiosadmin
**OR
**Alternate instructions
cd /usr/local/nagios/etc
htpasswd -c htpasswd.users nagiosadmin
cd /tmp/nagios-plugins-1.4.15
./configure --with-nagios-user=nagios --with-nagios-group=nagios
make
make install
ln -s /etc/init.d/nagios /etc/rcS.d/S99nagios
**At this point you should be done and should be able to use your browser using [http://<your nagios ip>/nagios ] and everything should be running well. But for **myself it didn't work this way. So I did the following
exit
sudo reboot
wait 5-10 mins for it to restart.
**if you try these commands to check if Nagios is running you may get a positive on the first and a definite "Config error" on the service nagios start
ps aux | grep bin/nagios (to check if it's running)
service nagios start (will start nagios)
**But here I then used my browser on my windoz machine and used the command:
http://<your.nagios.server.ip>/nagios
**And at this point is was up and running like a charm
**You can run the ps aux | grep bin/nagios & service nagios start commands now and you will get positives on both of them. I have no idea why it gives negative the first run before and after rebooting but this is how I got it to work on 3 servers using these exact instructions. It may be I just didn't wait long enough. Perhaps some of the Nagios guys can give some feedback on this. Again thank you to jsmurphy & sreighardt who were a great help and very patient with me throughout this process. I will post this up in the Ubuntu forum as I saw more than a few people on there who were having trouble. So hopefully it helps everyone out.
