Chapter 1. Installation

The simplest method of installation is for you to install the Nagios packages that are supplied with the distribution you are using. Nagios 2.x is by now extremely mature and is therefore a component of most distributions. The paths of individual directories in those packages maintained by Linux distributors are usually different from the default specified in the source package, and thus from the paths used in this book.

Nagios 3.0 is relatively new; it is recommended here that you "get your hands dirty" by compiling and installing the software yourself. The following installation guide also applies to Nagios 2.x, and any differences between versions 2.x and 3.0 are mentioned explicitly in the text.