setup nginx web server with PHP

Nginx (engine x) is a high performance lightweight HTTP server, more and more sites are using nginx, according to Netcraft survey (http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/11/01/november-2013-web-server-survey.html), nginx powers 15% of the busies sites in November 2013.

Nginx installation is very straight forward, we can download latest source code from http://nginx.org/en/download.html or point our yum source to http://nginx.org/packages/OS/OSRELEASE/$basearch/ and install using yum.
Replace “OS” with “rhel” or “centos”, depending on the distribution used, and “OSRELEASE” with “5” or “6”, for 5.x or 6.x versions, respectively.
So for CentOS 6.3, we can point our YUM source to: http://nginx.org/packages/centos/6/$basearch/

How to install Zabbix server on Linux server

Zabbix is an open source monitoring server, besides monitoring the service status, it also stores the historical status of service, so we can generate graphs easily from Zabbix.  I have been using Nagios for many years, recently I decided to give Zabbix a try.

Here are the steps I installed server.

First we need to download zabbix software, current stable version is 2.0.8, so I downloaded zabbix-2.0.8.tar.gz

1. create OS account for running zabbix server

# useradd zabbix

2.

# tar -zxpf zabbix-2.0.8.tar.gz
# cd zabbix-2.0.8

3. Zabbix uses databases as its data storage, it supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, DB2 and SQLite. In my setup I use MySQL.
Before Installing zabbix, we need to configure the database properly.
Follow instructions on this link to setup the database https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/2.0/manual/appendix/install/db_scripts
For MySQL:

mysql> create database zabbix character set utf8 collate utf8_bin;

mysql> grant all privilegs on zabbix.* to 'zabbix'@'localhost' identified by 'zabbix';
mysql> exit;

# mysql -uzabbix -pzabbix zabbix < database/mysql/schema.sql
# mysql -uzabbix -pzabbix zabbix < database/mysql/images.sql
# mysql -uzabbix -pzabbix zabbix < database/mysql/data.sql

4.

# ./configure --enable-server --with-mysql --with-net-snmp \
  --with-libcurl --prefix=/usr/local/zabbix
# make install

5. start zabbix server

# /usr/local/zabbix/sbin/zabbix_server

6. Install zabbix web interface:

# mkdir /var/www/html/zabbix/

# cp -pr frontends/php/* /var/www/html/zabbix/

7. Installing zabbix frontend
Open browser, go to http://localhost/zabbix, follow the instructions for frontend installation wizard to complete the installation.

8. After Installing, you will be able to login zabbix system, the default login ID is Admin, password is zabbix.

Next we need to install zabbix agent on remote hosts and zabbix server to monitor remote hosts.

Reference: https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/2.0/manual/installation/install#from_the_sources