[Nagiosplug-devel] Re: OF nagios plugins

[Andreas Ericsson]

Paul L. Allen wrote:
> Gavin Carr writes:
> 
>>  - check_linux_raid, a generalised version of contrib/check_linux_raid.pl
> 
> 
> I had to hack that myself to deal with various things that /proc/mdstat
> did in more recent versions of Red Hat.  It's late now (and I have applied
> several glasses of de-stressing fluid) so when I get time I'll check what
> you've done and see if I've done anything you've missed and try to merge
> it in.  If that's too hard I'll send you mine and let you try to merge it
> in. :)
> 
>>  - check_qmailq - based on contrib/check_qmailq.pl
> 
> 
> At one point check_mailq added support for checking qmail queues.  If it
> worked properly it would be better to use that rather than having a
> separate plugin to check qmail queues.  Check_mailq added -W and -C
> options for checks on preprocessed messages as reported by qmail-qstat.
> Unfortunately, the way it used GetOpt::Long caused meant that -W and -C
> caused an error about about a conflict with -w and -W

-W is also reserved by POSIX for implementation extensions, according to 
the getopt(3) man page. Plugins using it are broken.

> unprivileged users to run qmail-qstat (technically, it replaces the
> qmail-qstat shell script with a script that connects to a privileged
> daemon).  Installations that do not have the qmail-qstat patch will fail to
> work with check_mailq unless you setuid root on qmail-qstat or do some sudo
> magic.

sudo magic then, or suid the script interpreter. On most sane 
distributions scripts can't have +s.

>  This is undocumented in the plugin, so if you don't have the patch
> (or haven't applied it because you don't want ordinary users to see the
> output of qmail-qstat) then check_mailq will fail and you won't know why it
> fails for you even though it apparently worked for the authors.
> If those problems are fixed then check_mailq is a better way of doing it.
> If only because it means somebody else is maintaining it and you don't have
> to. :)

And also to not double the efforts. Code duplication is a fairly stupid 
way of keeping people busy without accomplishing all that much.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Lead Developer