[Nagiosplug-help] Problem with check_ping plugin

[Ralph.Grothe at itdz-berlin.de]

Dear NagiosPlug-Help List Members,

I'm new to Nagios and currently struggling with my initial basic
setup and getting the first monitors to work.

I had to compile Nagios and Nagios Plugins from the sources on an
AIX box with gcc

# uname -srv
AIX 3 4
# gcc -v
Reading specs from
/usr/local/lib/gcc-lib/powerpc-ibm-aix4.3.2.0/2.95.3/specs
gcc version 2.95.3 20010315 (release)


While the build and installation of Nagios and its Webserver
setup was easy,
the build of Nagios-Plugins was quite nerve wracking.

Although I extra rebuilt from sources the Gettext suite and libs
the Nagius Plugins wouldn't compile until I explicitly set the
--disable-nls configure switch.
Nevermind, I'm used to doing most of my documentation in English
so that I won't miss
national language support very much.
But digging in inexplicable compiler errors was a real pain.

Finally I used this configure statement to get my plugins
compiled.


# head -18 config.log|grep -v hostname
This file contains any messages produced by compilers while
running configure, to aid debugging if configure makes a mistake.

It was created by nagios-plugins configure 1.4, which was
generated by GNU Autoconf 2.58.  Invocation command line was

  $ ./configure --prefix=/opt/sw/nagios --with-nagios-user=nagios
--with-nagios-group=nagios --with-mysql=/opt/sw/mysql
--with-ping-command=/usr/local/sbin/fping -q -C 3 -t 2000
--with-libintl=/opt/sw/gettext --disable-nls

## --------- ##
## Platform. ##
## --------- ##

uname -m = 0045CB7A4C00
uname -r = 3
uname -s = AIX
uname -v = 4



As you can see I provided the path and args to fping (which I
already installed for my working monitoring setup with Mon) with
the --with-ping-command.
At the time of the build I wasn't quite aware what its use was
and what the consequences would be.

Now I find that the check_ping monitor isn't working (probably
because of my mistake to specify fping rather than AIX vanilla
ping).


$ ~nagios/libexec/check_ping -V
check_ping (nagios-plugins 1.4) 1.42
 
$ ~nagios/libexec/check_ping -H jupiter -w 1000.,70% -c 5000.,90%
-p 1
CRITICAL - Plugin timed out after 10 seconds


Do you think I will have to recompile (maybe at least
check_ping.c if I fumbled with the Makefile manually)
to get check_ping working?

You see, I'm still in my Nagios infancy, but I thought the most
basic sort of monitors must be those that simply ping an IP
address before I start with something more fancy.

There's another itch I have with the plugins.
I think the documentation on how to write Nagios plugins (i.e.
what arguments they expect, what stdout, stderr and return codes
they have to produce) is more than sparse (at least in that
respect I find Mon much more tangible and to the point).

Ok, in the contrib subdir of the plugins' tarball there are
plenty of 3rd party Perl plugins, and I'm quite comfortable with
Perl, so that I just could have a glimpse at them as a kind of
blueprint.
But I would have liked it very much if there was a part of the
Nagios documentation that at least would drop a few words about
that subject instead of merely pointing to a sourceforge URL
where there is only the download of the plugins tarball.
Forgive my ignorance, this is probably only owe to me being new
to Nagios where the various config, plugin and handler
interactions still are a bit confusing.

Many thanks in advance