What Is NetSaint? (Now Called Nagios)

http://www.netsaint.org

NetSaint is a network monitoring application.  Or perhaps more correctly, it is a system monitoring application.  It monitors hosts and services (alerting you when things go wrong), but does not perform traffic anaylsis, packet sniffing, etc. 

NetSaint was originally designed to run under Linux , although it should work under most other unices as well.  For more information on what OSes NetSaint will and will not run under, see the OS ports page at http://www.netsaint.org/ports.php .

Some of NetSaint's many features include: 

Monitoring of network services (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, PING, etc.) 
Monitoring of host resources (processor load, disk usage, etc.) 
Simple plugin design that allows users to easily develop their own service checks 
Parallelized service checks 
Ability to define network host hierarchy using "parent" hosts, allowing detection of and distinction between hosts that are down and those that are unreachable 
Contact notifications when service or host problems occur and get resolved (via email, pager, or user-defined method) 
Ability to define event handlers to be run during service or host events for proactive problem resolution 
Automatic log file rotation 
Support for implementing redundant monitoring hosts 
Optional web interface for viewing current network status, notification and problem history, log file, etc. 

Installation
On FreeBSD install straight out of the ports directory:
/usr/ports/net/netsaint/make install

This should install NetSaint as well as all the relevant dependencies.

Getting the Web Interface Running

In order to make the HTML files and CGIs accessible via the web, you'll have to edit your Apache web server configuration as follows... 

Add a line in the httpd.conf file as follows (change to match the directory structure for you installation)... 

Alias /netsaint/ /usr/local/netsaint/share/ 

This will allow you to use an URL like http://yourmachine/netsaint/ to view the HTML web interface and documentation.  The alias should be the same value that you entered for the --with-htmurl argument to the configure script (default is /netsaint/ ). 

You'll need to create an alias for the NetSaint CGIs as well.  The default installation expects to find them within http://yourmachine/cgi-bin/netsaint/ , although this can be changed using the --with-cgiurl option in the configure script.  Anyway, add something like the following to your httpd.conf file (changing it to match any directory differences on your system)... 

ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/netsaint/ /usr/local/netsaint/sbin/ 

Important: The ScriptAlias entry for the NetSaint CGIs must precede the standard ' ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /some...where../ ' directive already present in the configuration file.  If it doesn't, you will most likely be unable to access the CGIs. 

Once you've editing the Apache configuration file, you'll need to restart the web server with a command like this... 

/etc/rc.d/init.d/httpd restart 

For the documentation, point your web browser at:

http://your.web.server/netsaint/docs/index.html

And follow instructions to get the system up and running.