Simon Krenger

To monitor our software, we use the free Nagios supervision system fitted with custom checks for our application. This way, we can make sure that not only the Operating System is properly monitored but also the core components of our application including the Application Server and the Oracle Databases.

Today I tried to update to the latest version of Nagios 3.3.1 on one of our supervision servers running Ubuntu Server. So I downloaded the package, ran “./configure” and ran “make fullinstall“. I then stumbled upon the following (quite meaningless) error:

/usr/bin/install: omitting directory `includes/rss/extlib'
/usr/bin/install: omitting directory `includes/rss/htdocs'
/usr/bin/install: omitting directory `includes/rss/scripts'
make[1]: *** [install] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/tmp/nagios-3.3.1/nagios/html'
make: *** [install] Error 2
root@watchtower:/tmp/nagios-3.3.1/nagios#

Phew. Alright, using my trusty friend Google I quickly discovered a thread on ubuntuforums.org with the solution.

It basically is a syntax problem in the Makefile of Nagios. After running “./configure”, replace a few strings in the Makefile like so:

sed -i 's:for file in includes/rss/\*;:for file in includes/rss/\*.\*;:g' ./html/Makefile
sed -i 's:for file in includes/rss/extlib/\*;:for file in includes/rss/extlib/\*.\*;:g' ./html/Makefile

Then, you should be able to run

make fullinstall

without any further problems.