We've observed that the update of Nagios from version 4.0.8 to 4.2.4 in EPEL7 is causing some issues for both new openATTIC installations and updates of existing installations on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and derivatives like CentOS.

In this post, we will summarize the issues that affect openATTIC and how to resolve them.

When updating Nagios from 4.0.8 to 4.2.4 on a previously installed and configured openATTIC system, you will first have to fix the Nagios configuration.

As the nagios.cfg file has to be modified in order to enable PNP4Nagios, RPM will (righfully) refuse to replace it during an update and will place the new version into /etc/nagios/nagios.cfg.rpmnew instead. Unfortunately, the Nagios update also changes a lot of default values like directory names and file locations, so Nagios 4.2.4 will not start with a configuration file that was initially shipped with version 4.0.8.

If you haven't done any other changes to this file other than adding the PNP4Nagios configuration as outlined in the openATTIC installation instructions, the easiest way to resolve this problem to rename /etc/nagios/nagios.cfg.rpmnew to /etc/nagios/nagios.cfg and then re-apply the changes necessary to enable PNP4Nagios as outlined in the manual.

Moreover, the location of the status.dat file has changed, which breaks the oaconfig install command.

For both updating an existing system or a new installation on EL7, you will have to edit /etc/default/openattic after the initial installation and change the path names for the settings NAGIOS_STATUS_DAT_PATH and NAGIOS_STATUS_DAT from /var/log/nagios/status.dat to /var/spool/nagios/status.dat.

We submitted a bug report about this upstream, but at this point it's not feasible to roll back these changes, to avoid further breakage: EPEL7: Updating Nagios from 4.0.8 to 4.2.4 breaks existing installations

We'll update the EL7 configuration file /etc/default/openattic.conf in the upcoming openATTIC 2.0.19 release to adapt to this change in the Nagios 4.2.4 package in EPEL7. This is tracked in OP-1955 on our public issue tracker.

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