[Nagiosplug-devel] post-1.3.0 features

[Jeremy T. Bouse]

On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 10:29:12PM -0500, Karl DeBisschop wrote:
> developer time is in pretty short supply. I can kive with HEAD having
> brief period where it's a little dysfunctional.
> 
	You'll get no arguement again from me there... Fortunately as I've
convinced my company as Nagios (originally starting with Netsaint) for our
network monitoring needs and we require IPv6 ability I'm getting paid to spend
time working on this... When I'm not fixing problems with other departments (ie-
MIS dealing with Winbloze workstations) or maintaining MX, DNS, WWW, etc
servers...

> > 	Yeah I'll do that... I just need to figure out if getaddrinfo and
> > getnameinfo are available, if so use them otherwise I need to prolly create
> > equiv functions using getnameby* and getaddrby* function calls... I have
> > some code that's already #define'd (different from my original patch submitted)
> > so if I can get the test working in configure it should be smooth sailing 
> > from there...
> 
> Ah.. good. I was going to suggest that approach. Creating a stub like
> that can be pretty functional with fairly little investment of time. At
> least, I haven't heard many complaints doing millisecond timing that
> way.
>
	Yeah, I maintain libesmtp (LGPL) and it actually has a fairly decent
check for getaddrinfo and getnameinfo as well as a stub function to replace if
it isn't available... I may look and see if it can't be used to manage this or
if not point me in the right direction... I agree a lil investment in coding
time now will pay off in the long run...
 
> > 	As for plugins needing work to be AF-indep I could use some help
> > brainstorming specifically on check_ping as I've found some use the standard
> > ping with a '-A inet6' option and others (mainly linux) use ping6 for IPv6 
> > ping and standard ping command for IPv4... Need to come up with a portable
> > way of figuring this out so the code can be portable...
> 
> What about rewriting check_ping to call the network functins directly,
> instead of wrapping ping. I was once (even fairly recently) of the mind
> that I did not want to be responsible for suid code. But the fact of the
> matter is, we invoke suid code in ping anyway. So the risk is there,
> whether we chose to own it or not. Thoughts?
>
	I had actually had this very same idea for most of the plugins that make
external command line calls... Just something about it doesn't settle right with
me and we spend so much time in the configure process trying to figure out the
proper command line structure... If we can be sure there is a portable method of
doing the actual work internally I would find that much more agreeable and
easier to manage. I'd been specifically lookin at check_ping and the various DNS
(check_dns & check_dig) plugins to convert to using internal processing but
hadn't committed to it yet... I don't know if I have enough knowledge at this
point to tackle the ICMP processing yet. I'm not quite sure where a good example
of it would be as Linux has two seperate ping utils for it, while Solaris the
various BSDs and most others seem to only have one... I am pretty certain I
could tackle the DNS issues though having worked a bit in-depth with the bind
and resolver APIs on other projects...
 
> > 	I think the idea of adding -4 and -6 as plugin command line options
> > to force IPv4 or IPv6 was mentioned and would need to be hashed out. As well
> > I think configure should prolly be able to be compiled with IPv6 disabled if
> > it weren't required or wanted...
> 
> Never quite as simple as it seems at first.
> 
> I just opened up check_disk for a minor repair. Ended up deciding that I
> need to learn the statfs function, and stop wrpping df whenever
> statfs(2) is available. Never easy.
> 
> But alway educational, and sometimes even fun.
> 
	Yeah... but that's really the way I've learned is by picking something
apart and learning from it... I was never one for learning listening to lectures
in class... I had to be hands on and learn by trial and error... 

	Jeremy

BTW, are you not using a mailer that honor the Mail-Followup-To header? Or are
you just hitting reply-to-all?