Author Archives: Ethan Galstad

Uncomfortable Info On The Plugin Team Changes

Change isn’t always easy, but sometimes its necessary. Recently, the Nagios Plugins website and team have undergone some changes, and for good reason.  There have been a few people who have caused a stir about the changes, and there’s been some misunderstanding as to the reasons behind those changes, so we thought we’d share some relevant info with the community.

The changes were made because there was an organized effort by some individuals to undermine the project and move people to another solution.  Some of the previous team members decided “recently” to switch development to a new project after we started to employ some changes.  Except their decision to switch wasn’t recent – they made it months ago.  This can be evidenced in part by their Git commits which show them beginning to make a switch as early as last September.  You’ll notice the screenshot below showing a change that was made to start transitioning the Nagios plugins project to a new domain and project (original URL).

plugin-swtich

In addition to this and other similar changes, some of the previous team members started promoting competitors of Nagios in an effort to move people away from the project.  Our attempts to get a response from the previous team lead on multiple occasions to clarify what was happening was met with silence.  So we acted.

We stepped in to prevent these individuals from subverting the project.  We’ll do what we need to do to preserve the various Nagios projects from people and companies with ulterior motives.

Its been an interesting study to watch what some people try to get away with in order to promote their ulterior motives.  One example of this is the outright lies and FUD promoted by Michael Friedrich, as can be seen in his calls for the Fedora/RedHat maintainers to automatically switch Nagios users to a competing solution.  Not surprising that Michael works for Netways GmbH – the same company that recently wrongfully filed Nagios trademark and domain registrations in secret in order to undermine Nagios and the community.  Only after we shamed them by publicly disclosing the details, did Netways finally return the trademarks and domains they were leveraging.  I think its safe to say that words like honesty, integrity, and ethics aren’t valued or even understood by Netways and its employees.

We understand that it can get uncomfortable for individuals when evidence is presented that shows they acted less than honorably.  We at Nagios believe that who you work with is just as important as what it is that you’re working on.  We will always chose to work with individuals with high ethical standards and a great attitude.  If you have skills, but you don’t have values, you won’t be on our team.  Period.

– Ethan Galstad, Nagios Founder and Defender

Nagios Plugins Mailing Lists Moved To New Server

As part of our efforts to improve the Nagios Plugins project, we’ve moved from using the old SourceForge mailing lists for the Nagios Plugins project to a new dedicated list server.  The new mailing list server runs Mailman (which is what the old SourceForge lists ran), so you should find it familiar.  If you were a subscriber to one of the old Nagios Plugins mailing lists, you should have been automatically subscribed to the appropriate new list(s).

The main email list addresses for the Nagios plugins projects are now as follows:

We weren’t able to migrate list membership preferences from SourceForge, so if you prefer a digest subscription or other options, you’ll have to manage your subscription by visiting:

http://lists.nagios.com/mailman/listinfo/

The Nagios Plugins team, as well as the support staff at Nagios Enterprises will be helping to provide support for anyone who has problems or questions related to compiling, installing, or using the plugins

Nagios Plugins 1.5 Released

The Nagios Plugins Development Team is proud to announce version 1.5 of the Nagios Plugins! This release comes with the new check_dbi plugin written by Sebastian Harl, and includes lots of enhancements and fixes provided by more than forty contributors. Many thanks to all of you!

Special kudos go to Sven Nierlein for fixing numerous bugs, reviewing many pull requests, bringing our test suite back into shape, and setting up automated tests on a variety of platforms. This helped us spotting lots of bugs before the release. Let me also thank Ton Voon for doing the unenviable work of updating the bundled Perl modules; and our newest team member Jan Wagner for all his help with patch review.

See below for a list of major changes. Note that the new check_http version introduces two minor backwards incompatibilities mentioned at the end of that list, so please be sure to check whether they might affect you.

You can get the tarball from our download page.

Enhancements

  • New check_dbi plugin for checking an (SQL) database using DBI
  • Let OpenSSL load its configuration file (see the OPENSSL_config(3) man page)
  • Add performance data to check_apt
  • Add performance data to check_procs
  • Added -4/-6 options to check_dig
  • New check_oracle --connect option to perform real login
  • New check_nagios -t option to override the default timeout
  • New check_disk -f/--freespace-ignore-reserved option to ignore space reserved for root
  • New check_disk -N/--include-type option to limit the filesystem types to check
  • Allow for building the plugins in parallel
  • Add --without-{dbi,ldap,radius} options to ./configure
  • Made Verbose output of check_sensors compliant
  • New switch -E/--extended-perfdata for check_http to print additional performance data
  • New check_http -d option to specify a string to expect within the response headers
  • New check_http -J/-K options for client certificate authentication support
  • Add support for executing queries to check_pgsql
  • Let check_pgsql accept a UNIX socket directory as hostname
  • New check_pgsql -o option to specify additional connection parameters
  • New check_fping -S option to specify the source IP address
  • New check_fping -I option to specify the interface to bind to
  • Let check_fping support IPv6
  • New check_procs -k option to ignore kernel threads (on Linux)
  • Let check_procs use /proc/<PID>/exe (if available) instead of getpid(2), unless -T is specified
  • Let check_mysql support SSL
  • Let check_mysql add perfromance metrics for all checks
  • New check_mysql -f option to specify a client options file
  • New check_mysql -g option to specify a client options group
  • New check_snmp --offset option to allow for adding/substracting an offset value to sensor data
  • Let check_snmp support an arbitrary number of OIDs
  • Let check_ide_smart support NetBSD

Fixes

  • Change the MAIL FROM command generated by check_smtp to be RFC compliant
  • Fix compilation of check_http without SSL support
  • Fix check_snmp reversed threshold ranges (backward-compatibility)
  • Fix check_snmp memory violation when using more than 8 OIDs
  • Fix check_apt security regular expression
  • Fix check_http handling extra header (-k) containing semicolons
  • Fix check_apt handling unknown exit codes from apt-get
  • Fix deprecated imports of check_nmap.py

Warnings

  • check_http behaviour of -k/--header changed since it does not separate multiple headers by semicolons anymore. Use multiple -k switches instead.
  • check_http‘s --proxy_authorization option is now called --proxy-authorization (it was always documented this way)
  • The contrib directory has been removed. These days, sites such as Nagios Exchange serve as much better places for publishing plugins not maintained by the Nagios Plugins Development Team.