Install Nagios with different default user.
 

Hello Friends,

I successfully installed nagios monitoring tool on Debian server and works perfect.

Now I want to install on RHEL 5 server and it is production LIVE server. So i have to use different UserName rather then default nagios user.

I have searched in google but don't fine any documentation related to install nagios with different user and group.

Can somebody tell me how it is possible? I have tried few commands and try to compile and install but it fails every time.

I used ./configure --with-nagios-user=ex-nag --with-command-user=ex-nag --with-nagios-group=ex-nag --with-command-group=ex-nag but it doesn't work.

Help would be really appreciated.

Hi,

Why would you need to run it as different user than the default one?
If this is just a step to security through obscurity - simple trick would
be to change the username in the passwd/shadow file - keeping the user id.
Otherwise you'll need to change some directory ownership and permissions -
for example var and run related directories, where the process needs to
'operate' - create/modify/delete files.

Good luck

P.S. strace is your friend :)

As the previous poster said you shouldn't (need to) do this. If it's a production server then IMHO you should aim to keep things as uniform as possible to minimize (causing) problems with maintenance and such. While maybe not for RHEL but for at least for Centos Nagios and a slew of plugins are available from the repos. So changing user and group could cause problems if any scriptlets require default user and group, might cause problems if SELinux policy for Nagios is loaded and might hamper upgrading stuff. Besides on a system that uses a most mature package management system it's not advisable, unless there is no alternative, to install packages from source.