Reason for dropping contact_groups from hostgroup

[Andreas Ericsson]

Yann DIRSON wrote:
> Andreas wrote:
> 
>>Make heavy use of templates.
> 
> 
> Unfortunately, unless I miss something, I cannot "use" several other 
> templates when building a host block, whereas I can declare my host as 
> being part of several hostgroups.  And if we could, we would have to 
> define precedence rules between them, which would I think be more 
> complicated than just getting new contact_groups from all hostgroups.
> 
> What I do now is building new templates (ou1-os1-server, ou2-os3-server, 
> ou1-infra, etc.) as the need arise.  But there are several issues:
> - it is repetitive work to create them

man 1 sed, or read an online tutorial for it.
You can also turn on regular expression matching and name your 
hostgroups so that you can use it easily. It will triple the load-time 
of nagios but you will get what you want (with fewer lines of config 
than earlier).

> - there are combinatory scaling issues: number of templates is #os * #ou * 
> #types. For each new ou I have a number of templates, where I would only 
> have to add a single hostgroup.
> - all those -server templates inherit a generic-server template with a 
> given contact_groups, I have to explicitely repeat it and append new 
> groups, since I do not know how to just add contact_groups. Duplicated 
> information is always bad, especially as the configuration gets bigger.
> 

Nagios doesn't normalize its configuration anyway, so a lot of info is 
already duplicated.

> Indeed, I notice that nagios does not complain if I add several "use" 
> clauses in a host block, but I guess the last one takes precedence, since 
> it is what seems to happen with other fields like host_name.

True. You can do
contact_groups *
in the "master" template, and exclude them in the others(contact_groups 
!notwanted). That way it will get complemented rather than overwritten.

> Note that if 
> this is intended behaviour, I guess it should be documented in 
> xodtemplate.html, but I'd be more comfortable with nagios throwing out an 
> error in such cases.
> 

It is intended behaviour (an easter egg, more like it, but it's nifty). 
Feel free to submit a patch for the documentation.

> And while I'm at documentation issues, I'd find it pretty useful to have 
> the main doc index link to xodtemplate, and maybe templaterecursion as 
> well.  Currently the user has to guess through which page going to find a 
> link to this information.  Possibly some other docs would need similar 
> promotion.
> 

Like I said; Feel free to submit a patch to fix the documents. As 
always, coding comes first and documentation later. The other way around 
is only possible when making a new implementation of an already 
standardized interface/protocol/whatever.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Lead Developer


-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by: NEC IT Guy Games.  How far can you shotput
a projector? How fast can you ride your desk chair down the office luge track?
If you want to score the big prize, get to know the little guy.  
Play to win an NEC 61" plasma display: http://www.necitguy.com/?r=20