[Nagiosplug-devel] oddity about check_procs plugin and solaris

[Duncan Ferguson]

On 25 Mar 2009, at 22:05, Philip Brown wrote:

> I've been compiling nagios-plugins version 1.4.13 on solaris.
>
> I noticed with distaste the "pst3" hack. which requires being  
> installed as
> ROOT??
>
> I find this nasty, since /bin/ps itself does not require root.
> So I've been attempting to get the pluging to work "the old  
> fashioned way",
> calling ps.
>

/usr/bin/ps truncates the argument field to (iirc) 64 character so you  
cannot search on the whole argument string when matching some command  
strings.  This is a compile time setting taken from the system include  
files provided by Sun and hence is in the kernel..

/usr/ucb/ps does provide the full argument string BUT merges some of  
the numerical columns together when the values are too high - i.e. you  
cannot tell where SZ finished and RSS starts.  There are no options to  
allow for amending the column separators.

pst3 was written to get around both of these problems.

The current version of pst3 attempts to run the same way as /usr/ucb/ 
ps and it can be run as non-root but then it only fetches details for  
the current user rather than all users.  If you want pst3 to not  
require root then this is the area you can work on.

If I can find some tuit's I may have a look sometime next week.

  Duncs

-- 
Duncan Ferguson
Senior Developer

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