#$Revision: 1.9 $ Anywhere you see CURRENT_VERSION replace with 
#the version number (0.2, 0.5, 1.0)

For version tracking info see README.

Download the file nagios-popups_CURRENT_VERSION.tar.gz either from the link in
our downloads section or search for the project on sourceforge.

tar xvzf nagios-popups_CURRENT_VERSION.tar.gz and it will create a directory
called ${CURDIR}/nagios-popups_CURRENT_VERSION with the files in it.  Edit
popup-server.cfg and set the appropriate values for your system

Change sock, self and pid to your desired values. Make sure you have all the
required perl modules installed, perl -wc popup-server.pl should be able to
help you with finding missing modules (Can't locate [MISSING MODULE WILL BE
HERE]).

Now edit popups.cfg For windows workstations you have two choices that have
both worked for us. You can either install perl on the workstation or use
perl2exe and compile the script so that all you have to do is distribute one
.exe for the popup client.  

WARNING: THE CURRENT VERSION HAS NOT BEEN TESTED ON WINDOWS

**Beware perl2exe can be tricky to get working.** One annoyance/bug that has
already been pointed out (over and over again) is that net send does not have a
timeout function, that we can find, so if you get alot of alerts like we do,
then you might want to advise your users to turn off popups when they leave at
night or they will have to spend a few minutes every morning clearing the
screen. 


Now then, in order to get your nagios alerts to the popup server. You need to
write the alert to $sock that was defined earlier in popup-server.cfg. This can
become an issue because Nagios calls notify-by-* for each contact in the
service/host that is having a problem. Solutions: 1) Add a popup contact to
nagios with no cgi access that gets alerted for all services/hosts that you
want popups for 2) This one is a little more in depth, but is the route we
chose. We receive alerts via text message to our phones (small screen) we
wanted lots of info, but didnt want to scroll down 6 or 8 times to see it all
(lazy sysadmins) so we wrote epage.pl (re-written in C, that version will be
posted soon) that is called for every alert and does some stripping of the
alert for us (CRITICAL becomes crit, ACKNOWLEDGE becomes ack, full author names
become initials) and we have epage just post to a cgi we use internally, that
in turn posts to the providers messaging site to send messages to our phones. 
We told epage that when it sends an alert to a specific phone then to fire 
off a popup. I know this is kind of a hack, but it was quick and easy 
(if they ever fire me then they will have to take my
number out).  The second option was alot better for us, because we wanted to be
able to customize the page that went out and perl made that real easy. epage.pl
has been included with this package as an example. 

Well I hope this helps someone. If you have any questions you can always use
the forums on our site or the mailing lists on the sourceforge page 
(this site is a work in progress also, I am a sysadmin/coder
not a designer) or email me at: code at monkeypr0n d0t org 

There are mailing lists and all setup at sourceforge and hopefully someone will
subscribe and start using them.  
*Nagios is a registered trademark of Ethan Galstad
