BUG(ish):: Change the scheduled downtime page?

[Jamin]

On the Schedule Downtime Page in Nagios, I know you can change the
date/time lines to reflect how long you want the host to be down, (i.e.  
'fixed' time) but if I want to say that it will be down for 4 hours, and
type in the 4 in the bottom field, it still only does the default 2 hours
unless I uncheck the 'fixed' box.  But even with that it is unclear if 
notifications will go out after two hours are finished or after 4 hours. 

The Schedule Downtime interface is really unintuitive and depending on how
you fill out the fields, is very misleading and/or plain wrong.

Here is an example of what happened today.  Of course I know how the the
Schedule Downtime page really works, but other people just starting to use
it are having problems with some of Nagio'es intricacies.  Basically a
co-worker wanted the host to be down for 4 hours.  They filled out the
Duration field to schedule the host down for 4 hours and left the Start
and End time alone. (Default of 2 hours.)  They unchecked 'fixed' so that
the hard Start and End times will be ignored.

This is what we saw
FROM NAGIOS Host info page::

11-08-2002 13:06:06
This host has been scheduled for downtime starting between 11-08-2002 
13:05:19 and 11-08-2002 15:05:19 for a period of 4 hours and 0 minutes. 
Notifications for the host will not be sent out during that time period.


As you can see, the actual listed times do not reflect the duration 
period above.  This just not make sense. 

Of course, I could have actually changed the hard Start and End times, but
that is like using a sledge hammer when all you need is a small push.  
When most people want to schedule downtime they just want to work on
something starting "now" till however long they think it will take to fix
the problem.  Having the Duration field on there, people intuitively think
that, "hey I can just put how long I want nagios to ignore this machine,
and I'm good.  I don't have to worry about figuring out exact times and
dates."  The only time where they do worry about the exact Start and End
periods is for special cases and/or extended times when other people are
doing maintenance or working on, say, a monitored applications or such.

I suggest that we modify the page so that we can just say starting from
"Now" or the default Start field, that we schedule the X number of hours
and/or minutes of duration from "Now".  Then, on an 'advanced' section we
can have the currently used down time fields. If we could do some
re-organization of the scheduled downtime page I think much of this
confusion can be avoided in the future.

Of course this is just my idea, I am sure there are better ones out there.
All I would like is a more intuitive interface to the Schedule Downtime 
page because the current one is odd.  (Not to mention all the people 
working here have mis-interpreted the page and unintentionally scheduled 
shorter downtimes than they have expected. Except me of course. =) )

I apologize for any duplicate messages and for the length of the message.
I just hope that this will help nagios mature just that much more.  =)
Thanks for your time and I am interested in any input along this subject.

-Jamin

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 It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed.
 The hands acquire shaking.
 The shaking becomes a warning.
 It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. -Influenced by Dune
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