[Nagiosplug-help] Logos don't display on status map or in host status views

[Ralph.Grothe at itdz-berlin.de]

> From: Andreas Ericsson [mailto:ae at op5.se]

Hello Andreas

> gd2 isn't really an image-format in the sense that browsers and

> image-viewing programs can read and display them properly
(well, gimp 
> can but that's just odd). Instead, they're sort of pre-rendered

> meta-images that the gd-library can read to insert into other
images.
> 
>  >
>  > define hostextinfo {
>  >     host_name                           somehost
>  >     icon_image                          hp.gd2
>  >     icon_image_alt                      9000/800/rp7420
DEH******
>  >     statusmap_image                     hp.gd2
>  > }
>  >
> 
> This section above is basically wrong, because it will leave 
> interpreting of the hp.gd2 to the browser, which doesn't 
> understand it 
> so it'll show up as a question-mark (or possibly a broken
image).
> 
>  >
>  > Well I made a swift substitution %s/gd2/png/ and restarted
>  > nagios.
>  > Now the *png icons get displayed.
>  >
> 
> That's because the gd-library reads the .png images, 
> re-renders them to 
> .gd2 images internally and then creates the statusmap (which is

> basically just one big image) from those re-rendered gd2
images.
> 
> If you had instead done
> 
> 	%s/\(.*icon_image.*)\(.*gd2\)/\1\2.png/
> 
> (that is, replace only .gd2 for the icon_image variable) it 
> would still 
> have worked, but the statusmap.cgi binary wouldn't have to 
> re-render the 
> images internally.

Hope I got it right.
So the gd2 graphic meta data files are basically held in stock
to speed up the rendering of the status map.
Then I should refer to the true graphic file in PNG when
referring to the icon_image
(to give the browser something meaningful)
and for the status_map image its better to refer to the GD2
files?

As for the status map,
I found that the auto positioning of hosts and parent links in
the map isn't really nice
because I have a few hosts that are cluster nodes which
themselves host cluster packages
that are assigned virtual IP addresses (VIPs), and that I defined
as true hosts within
my nagios config.
This leads to a seemingly random shuffling between VIP hosts and
separate non-cluster hosts in the same
lan segment, with many criss cross lines of wide apart cluster
packages that should rather visually stick together.
To circumvent this would one have to assign the 2d_coords
parameter with x,y coordinates to position
them predictably?
Would one need a graphics editor or similar to measure the
coordinates?


Besides, I have another issue with the VIP hosts
that is not a specific plug-in question but rather some basic
nagios configuration
matter I suppose.

For all hosts that reside in lan segments where gateways don't
block ICMP echo requests
I defined as the basic check_command the check_host link to
check_icmp.
Additionally I defined a generic check_icmp service for all non
firewalled hosts
because I would like to make use of the performance data of these
service checks.

Therefore I sort of have a redundant notification if a VIP host
goes down.
Because the check_host command is immediately executed repeatedly
five times
(my generic host definition max_check_attempts assignment)
a down notification is instantly sent out,
far earlier than the service notification of the check_icmp would
be
because of the defined 3 minute retry_check_interval for
services.

As every cluster node hosts about 10-20 such VIP hosts
contacts get really bombarded with host down notifications
even during a relatively short reboot of a new kernel where the
service checks
thanks to their inert recheck behavior relaps back into a hard ok
state
before notifications were due.

I also defined parents relations for every VIP host that refer to
its hosting cluster node because I hoped that host down
notifications
would then be restricted to the parents if all nodes went down.
Would one rather have to define a host dependency to map this?


Because of all this mess I decided to disable host notifications
for those VIP hosts.

But I am not aware of the difference between a

notification_options	n

and a

notifications_enabled	0

in the host definition block.

The only difference to me apparent seems to be the note about the
state retention precedence over the latter parameter.