[Nagiosplug-help] Problem with check_ping plugin

[Ralph.Grothe at itdz-berlin.de]

Hello Andreas,
 
thank you for your quick response.
I have to apologize for not replying immediately but there was
urgent business.

Looks that I simply missed the documentation on plugin guidelines
from 

http://nagiosplug.sourceforge.net/developer-guidelines.html

You're right, there is all put down.

Probably the term "developer-guidelines" scared me off as (at
least for now) I only intend to write my own plugins not for
public interest.

Meanwhile I also discovered that the officially distributed
check_by_ssh plugin is not quite behaving as I would expect.
Before trying to get this as well as the check_ping or other
plugins working with our site I think I'm better off with my own
Perl plugins that replace those offerings.
You see, from our admin server that shall host the Nagios server
most of the hosts I need to monitor aren't responding to pings
because they sit in firewalled LANs
This is a really bad thing, and I'm a bit crossed that our
firewall admins are dropping any ICMP request even, legitimate
internal ones (like from a Nagios monitor), which in my opinion
contradicts to RFC recommendations.
So I only get through over Port 22.
That's why I have to come up with my own "check_ssh_ping" monitor
that could be using CPAN's Net::Ping.
This is a nice ping OO frontend to IO::Socket.
Net::Ping let's me chose the transport (viz. ICMP|UDP|TCP) as
well as the port.

Regards
Ralph

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andreas Ericsson [mailto:ae at op5.se]
> Sent: Friday, July 01, 2005 11:24 AM
> To: nagiosplug-help at lists.sourceforge.net
> Subject: Re: [Nagiosplug-help] Problem with check_ping plugin
> 
> 
> Ralph.Grothe at itdz-berlin.de wrote:
> > 
> > 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?
> > 
> 
> If check_icmp built properly you can simply copy it to
check_ping and 
> all should be well. It's also quite a bit faster than the other
two.
> 
> > 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.
> > 
> 
> That's why there are actually 3 ping plugins.
> 
> > 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).
> > 
> 
> There is a "plugin developers guidelines" which is broken and 
> deprecated 
> in many places, but distributed with the plugins none the less.
It 
> contains all the rules for writing plugins.
> 
> > 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
> 
> 
> The Nagios documentation is quite riddled with references to 
> the rules 
> of writing plugins. Those rules however are so simple that it's
quite 
> easy to miss them;
> 1. Each plugin must exit with a return code indicating its 
> status, where 
> 0 = OK, 1 = WARNING, 2 = CRITICAL, 3 = UNKNOWN. For 
> host-checks 0 = UP 
> and everything else means DOWN.
> 2. Each plugin will have one line of its output read by Nagios.
> 
> Those are the rules and they are mentioned several times in
both the 
> nagios docs and the plugins guidelines.
> 
> -- 
> Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
> OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
> Lead Developer
> 
> 
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