Status of IPv6 support

[Jochen Bern]

On 05/20/2011 05:47 PM, Jumper99 at gmx.de wrote:
> what is the current status of IPv6 support in Nagios?
> I found an almost complete patch for IPv6 support at
> http://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Patches/Nagios
> 	/Add-IPv6-address-to-host-definition/details and was wondering
> when this or a similar patch will make it info Nagios. I applied the
> patch with small changes to my Nagios 3.2.3 installation and it works
> fine.

Technically, the Nagios core doesn't *care* whether hosts' "address"
statements give IPv4, IPv6, Ethernet MACs, or (almost) anything else;
I'm running one Nagios installation where most "address"es happen to be
${IPV4ADDR}:${SSHPORT} or even *chains* of such, and another where some
pseudohosts are specified as ${IPV4ADDR}:${SNMP_INTERFACE_ID}. It's the
defined commands, and ultimately the plugins, which have to be able to
understand non-IPv4 "address"es (and that *can* be done by using a
separate set of commands for the hosts in question).

Having that said, the differences between the patch you found and using
custom object variables
	http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/customobjectvars.html
in a similar way seem to be:
-- a nicer name ($HOSTADDRESS6$ instead of, e.g., $_HOSTADDRESS6$ ...)
-- the patch adds the value of $HOSTADDRESS6$ into the CGI pages
   wherever $HOSTADDRESS$ is already displayed
-- you can find hosts from their IPv6 address by typing that into the
   search field (... I guess)

However, there also is a price to be paid for having several addresses
per host (with or without marking them as IPv4 or IPv6 beforehand): It
muddies the definition of a host being "UP" or "DOWN", and thus a lot of
the logic derived from it (the whole thing about suppressed
notifications for UNREACHABLE hosts, and for services of all these
hosts). Unless I have *very* good reasons not to, I'd prefer to
configure separate pseudohosts for every address a machine has (and
possibly make the bread-and-butter IPv4 pseudohost the parent of the
others).

Kind regards,
								J. Bern
-- 
Jochen Bern, Systemingenieur --- LINworks GmbH <http://www.LINworks.de/>
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