Arch Linux User Repository

@Laurazepam: I'll take a look at this, but basically It should work exactly as @Rhinoceros said. The PKGBUILD is more than 10 years old, with practically no changes, so it might be time to make some corrections :).

Thanks for the detailed report @Laurazepam. I'm not entirely sure what's going on here. If the nagios user doesn't already exist, the PKGBUILD will install using UID and GID = 30. nagios.install will run later, creating the user/group when you actually install. This makes sense, because not everyone building will install, and you don't want to create the user/group unnecessarily.

Hence the PKGBUILD can potentially use chown with the UID/GID instead of user/group string, which should work fine. (I'm not 100% sure about the references in ./configure though.)

I think the "range" issue you got was because only system users are meant to be <1000, so probably not relevant.

So basically, I don't know! Happy to take comments from my co-maintainer @Idares.

On a fresh install the install script failed to create the nagios user and group. Didn't get any errors before the very end "/usr/bin/install: invalid user: '30'". After creating the user and group manually it worked fine.
On my first attempt it showed:

*** Configuration summary for nagios 4.5.9 2024-12-19 ***:

 General Options:
 -------------------------
        Nagios executable:  nagios
        Nagios user/group:  30,30
       Command user/group:  30,30

After creating the user and group manually instead I got (everything else was the same):

*** Configuration summary for nagios 4.5.9 2024-12-19 ***:

 General Options:
 -------------------------
        Nagios executable:  nagios
        Nagios user/group:  nagios,nagios
       Command user/group:  nagios,nagios

From the PKGBUILD:

_nagios_user="nagios"
_nagios_group="nagios"

getent group $_nagios_group > /dev/null || _nagios_group=30
getent passwd $_nagios_user > /dev/null || _nagios_user=30

Seems like the variables are overwritten with the literal number 30 if the user/group "nagios" doesn't already exist. I'm guessing that wasn't the goal here. No prior user or group with UID/GID 30 or with the name "nagios" existed before I tried to install this. When creating the user manually I got the error "useradd warning: nagios's uid 30 outside of the UID_MIN 1000 and UID_MAX 60000 range." and exit code '2', maybe that caused the issue?

No worries @Idares. Thanks for the add.

@Rhinoceros: I added you to co-maintainers, sorry for the late response.

... I'll just flag it out of date again then 😐️

@Idares I think I've flagged this as out-of-date the last 10 times or so. I'm happy to continue doing so, but if you prefer to add me as a co-maintainer, I can just bump it myself. No big deal either way.

@Idares - I was able to compile this package on both a Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 with the 64-bit version of Arch Linux Arm. Is it possible to add 'aarch64' to the PKGBUILD for anyone else wanting to run a Nagios server on a Pi 3/4?

TIA

@mosh5382 I've had the php7 binary moved away for over a week and haven't noticed anything weird yet. Please let me know if you upgrade and/or run into problems.

I don't actually use check_by_ssh, so yeah, you might need the home directory in your case then.

@Rhinoceros - I was unable to tell conclusively if PHP 7.4 was a requirement. The official Nagios documentation is unclear however I was unable to find any mention of Nagios and PHP 8. A lot of non-Arch distributions ship outdated versions of PHP so this may be more of an issue for Arch users only. My Nagios machine is a VM so I will certainly snapshot it before trying an upgrade to PHP 8.

I was able to get the email notifications working with s-nail. I suspected there was a way to get this working without the /home/nagios directory for the email configuration. However, what about "check_by_ssh"? Won't the ssh keys have to be in the /home/nagios/.ssh directory for it to work?