On Mon, Nov 19, 2007 at 12:34:31PM +0100, Stoned Elipot wrote:
> Hi,
> I'd like to make some changes to the Nagios packages and would like
> to give the opportunity to the users of these packages to comment on
> them.
> 
> * Sync users and groups usage with Nagios install documentation/recommendations
> ** create a Nagios user and its group (ok the existing packages already do
> that) and make them user-settable at package build time.
> ** create a "external command" Nagios group, id est a "http server
> group" and use this as the "command group". It
> would be user-settable at package build time and would
> defaults to the apache group. The message displayed at package
> installation time will suggest that the nagios user should be added
> to the external command group (the pkgsrc framework does not permit
> to specify multiple group for a user).
> ** drop the 'Nagios Administrator' user provided by the nagios-base
> package: I do not understand its purpose.
> 
> * Introduce a base directory for log files and status files via the
> user-settable variable NAGIOSDIR which would defaults to
> $VARBASE/spool/nagios.
> Right now the packages spread the log files and status files in
> $VARBASE/log/nagios and /var/run/nagios. The last path is puzzling
> me as it means that most of the time the directory /var/run/nagios
> has to be created each time the system is booted and nothing in
> the nagios-base package supplied startup script arranges for that.
> 
> Note I would keep /var/run/nagios.lock as pidfile.
> 
> * Make $PREFIX/libexec/nagios/check_icmp group owned by the Nagios
> user so it could be used by Nagios daemon out of the box.
> 
> As added bonus I'll update the nagios packages of course :)
> 
> Comments ?
> 
> Cheers, Stoned.



I was planning to make similar changes to the nagios package(s), at least the
NAGIOSDIR part.  It's very annoying that disabled notifications and other run-
time configuration aren't persistent across reboots.  So that's fine with me.

There's also an issue with shared directories between the different nagios-*
packages, they aren't managed correctly.

As for the update: I've been running Nagios 2.9 for a while here, but it needs
PTHREAD_DIAGASSERT=A due to a mutex bug that the Nagios developers haven't
been willing looking into [1].  The latest version not exposing this bug was
2.6 IIRC.


	Geert


[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.network.nagios.devel/4291