William Hurley wrote an interesting blog article for TalkBMC titled Welcome to Opensville, Population Zero. In it, he talks about how Open Source projects like Nagios are increasingly coming under fire from the pirate mentality found in many commercial offerings. A very interesting, quick read that I thought many of you would be interested in.
Many Open Source projects suffer (directly and indirectly) from the pillaging that often occurs due to overzealous corporate ambitions. There are companies that do contribute back to the projects they derive benefit from, and that’s fantastic. Those business are a part of the Open Source community, just like the project developers, contributors, and users. I take issue, however, with companies that seek to align and associate themselves with a project solely for their own benefit…
NagVis is a alternativ addon for the statusmap in Nagios. With NagVis you are able to create image maps to display your workflow processes with underlying Nagios status data. NagVis use the NDO to display the maps in realtime. Features are:
- Display of single Hosts, Services, Hostgroups, Servicegroups or another NagVis-Map as one icon
- A WUI to create maps via drag and drop
- Can be used own shapes and Icons for the maps
- And many more…….
For more information visit http://www.nagvis.org.
It was a small step for other, but a big step for us.
The PNP Developer Team is proud to announce that we’ve done the step and are now one of the many great Sourceforge.net projects.
Since a few weeks we have ported our svn repository and the release files to SF.net as the project name pnp4nagios.
PNP is a Nagios addon to establish performance data charts without doing big configuration on them. Our goal is to provide a tool “That just works.”.
Also we decided to establish a few mailinglists to communicate outside our german location.
We hope that you enjoy PNP and send us many nice ideas for further work.
It feels like it has been ages ago that I took to the stage to give the Lightning talk at FOSDEM about the Nagios Plugins. Actually, it was ages ago, I just never got round to sorting out the screencast of the presentation I gave. Well, now it is sorted and without further ado, you can grab the screencast and the example script from here. Warning, the movie is 35MB. But it’s worth it!
Synopsis: I talk about Nagios, the Plugins and how to create a cool (literally) plugin using the perl module Nagios::Plugin in under 8 minutes.
Update: Permissions on the example check_weather script were wrong, so couldn’t be downloaded. Sorry - I’ve fixed them now.
In order to make it easier for users to have access to the latest and greatest documentation, the online HTML docs for Nagios 2.x and Nagios 3.x are now updated daily from CVS. PDFs of the HTML documentation are now also updated daily. Special thanks to Holger Weiss for contributing the scripts and config files for generating the PDFs!
You can find the latest HTML and PDF versions of the documentation at http://www.nagios.org/docs/
It’s a real pain writing configure scripts. Autoconf makes things easier, but it is really hard to autodetect software correctly.
The plugins are particularly onerous because usually a single executable, say check_ldap, has requirements that no other plugin has.
Lately, I’ve been trying to work out what’s the best way of detecting mysqlclient. For pre-1.4.7, we used mysql_config to gives us the list of necessary libraries at compile time. On my Debian server, mysql_config --libs says: -L/usr/lib -lmysqlclient -lz -lcrypt -lnsl -lm. This was a much better way than trying to manually work out all the various libraries required. So configure said: “if mysql_config exists, compile check_mysql”.
Good, eh? Nope.
Continue reading ‘mysqlclient detection in Nagios Plugins’
There has been a bit of confusion about how the Nagios Plugins distribution installs the core C and script plugins. A common scenario is that the plugins are owned as the nagios user. We try to use the standard GNU tool chain mechanisms to install executables and, funnily enough, there is no documented support for installing as a specific user or group.
This is complicated by the fact that there are two plugins, check_dhcp and check_icmp, which have to be run as root, so need to be installed with the setuid bit on and the owner as root.
Continue reading ‘Installing the Nagios Plugins’
The NagiosCommunity.org site was officially launched yesterday, despite the fact that I failed to send an announcement email out. 
The site was linked from Nagios.org yesterday and a number of users have signed up for the blog and wiki in the first 24 hours. An official email announcement will be going out today - I promise! Thanks to Max Hetrick, Mark Young, and Alessandro Martins for their help in getting the site up and ready.
Patrick Proy just informed me that the French translation of the Nagios 2 documentation is ready to go. It has been linked on the wiki for those who are interested. Thanks to everyone who helped work on the translation: Erwan Ben Souiden, Hervé Bouchind’homme, René Coulet, Philippe Delsol, Xavier Dusart, Johan Moreau, Hervé Nicol, and Patrick Proy. Kudos!
René Purcell will be giving a two hour presentation on Nagios and Oreon in Quebec, Canada on March 7th, 2007 at Le Techno Centre Logiciels Libres.
le TC2L est heureux de vous inviter le 7 mars 2007, Ã la conférence “les mercredis du libres” portant ce mois-ci sur la supervision des systèmes et réseaux.
For more information visit:
http://lesmercredisdulibre.tc2l.ca/index.php?id=261.
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