[Nagiosplug-devel] Checking for unknown NIS servers?

[Andreas Ericsson]

sean finney wrote:
> hi benny,
> 
> On Thu, Feb 09, 2006 at 01:24:46PM -0600, C. Bensend wrote:
> 
>>   So, we've been burned a few times in the past weeks when an
>>unauthorized (accidental) NIS server was brought up on our network.
>>And since it didn't have the correct maps, clients that latched
>>onto it began having problems.  Not so much.
>>
>>   I checked around nagiosexchange, and didn't find anything.  Do
>>any of you happen to have a Nagios check that will alert if any
>>unknown NIS servers answer an NIS broadcast?  Man, would I
>>appreciate not having to try to figure that one out.  :)
> 
> 
> if you could write me a fairly portable chunk of (preferably C)
> code that sent out a broadcast and returned a list of domains,
> i'd be happy to throw it in a plugin for you, but i'm not familiar
> enough with NIS to know off the top of my head an easy way to
> do that.
> 

I think that will be fairly difficult. Broadcasting for responses and 
checking if there is one that shouldn't be there means waiting for ALL 
servers on the network to respond. This quickly turns unwieldy even for 
small networks, since most have some IP-addresses empty. Management 
nightmare, if I ever saw one.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231