When I go to install something I typically look for a virtual appliance to save me the time of having to build it out from scratch. The packages themselves rarely take long to install, but there are always dependencies and then there’s something weird with CPAN or whatever. Next thing I know I am I stuck in the mire of dependency hell. Instead, these days I look for a virtual appliance first, which in many cases is built by the team who develops the package itself (be it commercial or FOSS). Virtual appliances in turn gives me more time to spend on configuration. Furthermore, if everything is on a nice, light virtual machine then I am not host dependent.
Someone recently mentioned Jumpbox to me, a service that allows you to download and run open source packages, each in its own dedicated virtual machine. Jumpbox is a paid for service, it’s not free. But it is easy and fast. And, luck would have it that just when I was getting ready to set up Nagios afresh, they had a VM for it for free, a sampling of their service. So grab that and then fire it up and a web page pops open (how they open a web page using a vmx I should write an article on later).
From here, click on the https:// link and you’ll come to a page that allows you to authenticate into Nagios and set some very basic items on the VM, which btw, has no windowing system like KDE or Gnome installed (it’s probably faster that way). Here, you can change basic settings though, if you’re not comfortable with your Linux command line foo.
Once you enter the password that you provided during setup, you’re good to go, as seen below:
Now, I’m not going to go and pay about a grand a year for all these VMs on the jumpbox site. Especially not when I could create them all, upkeep and sell them myself if I had the time and inclination. But you know, some readers might want to. If you use Nagios instead of Lithium for this sole purpose then it just payed for itself. Having said that, I’d just use the package installer for Zenoss and read the manual for it instead… But, after you download the file from Jumpbox you can easily be up and running in 5 minutes or less…
