Hi,
I am brand new to Ubuntu and I am trying to setup a monitoring P.C. using Ubuntu 8.1 with Nagios 3.1
Amongst other things I want to check on the condition of our network printers and I am being informed through forums that I need to install net-snmp and net-snmp-utils.
I have been able to locate and install the net-snmp-5.2.5.1.tar.gz file but I am unable to locate the net-snmp-utils file.

Please can anybody point me in the correct direction to obtain the required file

Welcome to LQ!

You should use Ubuntu's package manager to install these packages. In most Linux distros, most common software is installed via the package manager, which in Ubuntu's case is apt-get or aptitude (command line) or synaptic (GUI). I don't have an Ubuntu box at home at the moment, but if you're in GNOME, the package manager should be somewhere under System -> Administration IIRC. You might also want to consider upgrading to a newer Ubuntu, since I believe 8.10 is close to beign out of support -- both 9.04 and 9.10 have been released.

Hi, I used apt-get to install the net-snmp (net-snmp-5.2.5.1.tar.gz) but as I don't know the actual file name of the net-snmp-utils file or where it can be found I am having a problem.

You don't use apt-get to install a .tar.gz ... when you do "apt-get install net-snmp" it actually fetches the .deb (Debian/Ubuntu packageformat) file from a server and istalls it for you. Why don't you try typing "apt-get install net-snmp-utils" (no quotes) and see if that works for you.

Hi, I tried the command line apt-get install net-snmp-utils, all that happened is it did some searching and then it reported,
E: Couldn't find package net-snmp-utils

` .

Hmm, I looked in my Ubuntu box and the net-snmp-utils indeed doesn't seem to be a valid package. It's possible that the utilities are simply included in the net-snmp package. Different distributions organize packages differently, so for example Red Hat might have two packages net-snmp and net-snmp-utils whereas Ubuntu has all of the SNMP stuff is a single net-snmp package. Can you tell us exactly what directions you're following and what commands you need access to? It's possible they're already installed from the net-snmp package. You can list the contents of net-snmp by doing:

dpkg -L net-snmp

Hmm, I looked in my Ubuntu box and the net-snmp-utils indeed doesn't seem to be a valid package. It's possible that the utilities are simply included in the net-snmp package. Different distributions organize packages differently, so for example Red Hat might have two packages net-snmp and net-snmp-utils whereas Ubuntu has all of the SNMP stuff is a single net-snmp package. Can you tell us exactly what directions you're following and what commands you need access to? It's possible they're already installed from the net-snmp package. You can list the contents of net-snmp by doing:

dpkg -L net-snmp

Sorted,
Instead of downloading the net-snmp taz file and then installing, configuring, make etc I was pointed in the direction of using "apt-get install snmp" which I did before I installed nagios and the nagios plugins.
I am now able to monitor the printers O.K.