After all the troubles I encountered with PHP and Mysql, I decided to install an application called myPHPadmin. This is a cool PHP application that allows you to manage your PHP installation and your MySql database all via a web browser. I highly recommend it!

I have subsequently discovered that Ubuntu has an installation option called LAMP. Linux, Apache, MySql and PHP. This would have made my webserver installation MUCH easier because it automatically installs all the required options. DOH!

My Nagios

Now that I have all these different servers and VMs running I decided that I would create one more VM and install the monitoring tool called Nagios.

Again using the Ubuntu Linux OS, I installed the Nagios package and quickly had the monitoring server running. Next I needed to install agents on the machines to be monitored.

For the windows systems I use the NSCleint++. Installation and connectivity to monitoring server was straight forward.

For the Linux servers I use the Nagios-NRPE agent. This was a little more difficult to get going, but after trial and error I as able to get it configured properly.

The last step in the whole setup was to get sendmail to work on Linux so I could send email either through my own mail server or through my ISP mail relay. The sendmail package was needed and I needed to make the following change to the sendmail.cf file:

# “Smart” relay host (may be null)
DSmailserver

This change allows sendmail to send email to may “mailserver” relay.

Now I am able to have Nagios send Warnings and Alerts to my email address as well as b2evo send email to the Blog owners.