Updating Nagios in EPEL-7 (Looking for Testers)

One of the projects on my plate this year is to update the Fedora Project nagios server so that monitoring is done through a better template system in ansible. [The main reasons for using nagios versus going to another system are the following: a) We already have nagios in place and have used it for years, b) it doesn't use/need a database backend for either its webpages or monitoring systems, c) before I can compare other systems I need an updated version of nagios to know what features we would get.]

In looking at Nagios, I found that the current maintainer was not responding to tickets. In fact at the time I was looking for him, their email domain wasn't registered in DNS or whois. While that has been fixed, there has been no response to emails so I have had to start the Non Responsive Packager process. The other item found was that we had various problems in the 4.0.8 package which were only supported and fixed in the current version 4.2.2 . While I started working on this, a person with the nick of Petaris showed up in #epel on freenode with the same problem. They needed to get an updated package into place and were looking for help on what was needed to update the package. Jason Tibbitts helped him set up an fedpkg environment and worked through a couple of problems that were happening. Last week, I looked over the package some more and realized there were problems with the old layout.

The upstream Nagios package assumes that it has complete write access to /var so it drops various configuration and control files in the %localstatedir configuration point. That doesn't work in things like Fedora (and probably Debian?) where it was chosen to put all of that in /var/log/nagios/ . This allowed for everything to be in one spot but as the Nagios code gets more complex more subdirectories with different needs occur (including it looked like /var/log/nagios/log/). I reworked the patches so that they allowed for /var as the %localstatedir and then put various control files in /var/spool/nagios and the log files and their archives in /var/log/nagios. [This may be the wrong place, please let me know and I can fix.]

Petaris took the patches and some other comments and put together a koji build that has the test code in it. Work was also put together on updating nrpe to version 3.0.1 and nagios-plugins to 2.1.3. There is an selinux problem we are trying to work together with a policy that should allow people to work until it is fixed upstream.

In order to make testing easier, I have created a copr for all the current Nagios packages. Currently it works on EPEL-7.

dnf copr enable smooge/Nagios_Update # if you have CentOS dnf
yum copr enable smooge/Nagios_Update # may work also.

Depending on the feedback I am getting on this, I can then work on updating the packages in EPEL-6 and Fedora Rawhide. [This is also my first copr in a long time so I may have built things in a less than optimal way.]