What you need for this book

In an attempt to work with a "standard" installation of Nagios Core, this book's recipes assume that Nagios Core 3.0 or later and the Nagios plugins set have been installed in /usr/local/nagios, by following the Nagios Quickstart Guides available at http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/quickstart.html.

If your system's package repositories include a package for Nagios Core 3.0 or later that you would prefer to use, this should still be possible, but the paths of all the files are likely to be very different. This is known to be a particular issue with the nagios3 package on Debian or Ubuntu systems. If you are familiar with the differences in the installation layout that your packaging system imposes, then you should still be able to follow the recipes with only some path changes.

For the screenshots of the web interface, the familiar Nagios Classic UI is used (with white-on-black menu), which was the default from Version 3.0 for several years before the newer "Exfoliation" style (with black-on-white menu) became the default more recently. Some of the graphical elements and styles are different, but everything has the same text and is in the same place, so it's not necessary to install the Classic UI to follow along with the recipes if you already have the Exfoliation style installed.

If you really want the Classic UI so that what you're seeing matches the screenshots exactly, you can install it by adding this as the final step of your installation process:

# make install-classicui

This book was written while the alpha of Nagios Core 4.0 was being tested. I have reviewed the change logs of the alpha release so far, and am reasonably confident that all of the recipes should work in this newer version's final release. If after Nagios Core 4.0 is released you do find some issues with using some of the recipes for it, please see the "Errata" section to let the publisher and author know.