Installing Inagios for Nagios with an Iphone

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Some notes on installing and configuring Inagios, the Iphone Nagios interface

inagios running on an Iphone These are not official instructions, but we hope they may be of help to others who are experiencing installation problems.

What is Inagios?

Inagios is a simple iPhone interface to your Nagios front-end server. Like many internet service providers and web hosts we use Nagios for monitoring our network.

Notes on the install

The code for Inagios can be downloaded from the link above. These notes relate to inagios-beta-20080318. There are two components provided:

A sample httpd.conf file
Contents of the html directory as used at Inagios.com

NB: There is NO "installer" as such.
At the time of writing (October 2008), instructions are sparse:

You will need the following installed:

+ Apache 2
+ mod_perl 2
+ HTML::Mason
+ MySQL

There is a bug that manifests itself if you are loading a large Nagios site, where handful of services do not show up properly.

We found there were a number of additional steps that were required to get a working interface so we could view our Nagios site on the Apple Iphone.
We decided to get it working without SSL to start with, and to simplfy as much as possible and then debug to get a working website. We enabled SSL towards the end, as it seemed ssl connections may have been hardcoded into the scripts.
We copied the supplied httpd.conf into our apache conf.d folder and commented out a lot of the lines in the httpd.conf file - for instance the SSL section and the "SSLRequireSSL" Directory section. Note that various Module sections are already commented out at the top. You'll need to uncomment these and make sure Apache restarts. We'd recommend uncommenting one at a time and restarting Apache each time.
In fact we left the Perl Modules in the section called "Better performance" commented out til the end as we thought they would be loaded automatically by the script as it ran. This caused problems as this didn't seem to happen.
You'll need to make sure you have mod_perl 2 installed, and the mod_apreq2 Apache module.
Install the Perl modules like this:

perl -MCPAN -e 'install Bundle::HTML::Mason'
perl -MCPAN -e 'install XML::Simple'
etc

You'll probably find a number of additional modules are needed, just install as they show up as missing in the error logs. Alternatively, if you look through the various files provided you can see mention of additional perl modules - check they are installed.

Modification of hard-coded variables

There are a number of files you'll need to modify to suit your own environment.
inagios.com.conf: The ServerName and DocumentRoot, plus the SSL cert info<
iNagiosWebApp.pm: The Database name, username and password lines 42-44
login.js: the ServerHost variable on line 27
trimCacheDB.pl: Line 25 As you can see from above, you'll need to create a MySQL user and database for the script.

Tips

Make sure you test in Safari web browser. It'll work fine on your desktop - you don't need an Iphone to test.

Nicola Worthington

Use Safari's Developer mode. In login.js at line 108 you'll see console.log (..) commented out - if you uncomment this, in the Safari Developer mode you can see the data from this item.

We'd like to say a big thank you to the developer Nicola Worthington of this application - it looks great in the iphone and we appreciate the effort that went into developing it. Apologies if we've forgotten anything - the install was done over a few days and with the help of lots of coffee.

Other useful gadgets for the iphone: ping, Lookup, TouchTerm (SSH app) and VNC