attempt recovery on service CRITICAL with nrpe

Carroll, Jim P [Contractor] jcarro10 at sprintspectrum.com
Fri Jan 31 20:27:31 CET 2003


If you're running the nrpe daemon on your client host as the unprivileged
user nagios, you might discover some privilege problems, especially trying
to start network daemons which listen on ports below 1024.  If you're
running the nrpe daemon on your client host as root, ... ah, but there's no
point discussing that insecure option, because you wouldn't be doing that.
Would you?  ;)

There might be better options to consider.  The one which springs to mind is
daemontools (http://cr.yp.to/)  This is certainly how tinydns and dnscache
run.  If (for some unknown reason) the daemon exits, daemontools will simply
start it up again.  If you direct daemontools to shut down the daemon, then
it will.  If you direct daemontools to restart the daemon, then it will.

Daemontools may not work for all daemons available.  Having said that, there
may be other solutions out there.

I'm more in favour of letting Nagios do the centralized monitoring, and
letting systems keep themselves running.  If you push the responsibility of
restarting daemons to Nagios, you now have a single point of failure (not to
mention the latency between checks in larger environments which could delay
the recovery of a downed daemon).

Something else to consider is this:  If a daemon dies for no good reason,
why not get to the bottom of it and get it fixed?  Especially if it's a
mission critical process?

Just my $0.02.

jc

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Shayne Lebrun [mailto:slebrun at muskoka.com]
> Sent: Friday, January 31, 2003 12:34 PM
> To: nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
> Subject: RE: [Nagios-users] attempt recovery on service CRITICAL with
> nrpe
> 
> 
> If only NRPE could pass arguments, I could do something like:
> 
> event_handler    check_nrpe!restart-sillydaemon
> 
> Then in your command:
> command
> command_line      /path/check_nrpe -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -c
> restart-sillydaemon -ArgChain 
> $SERVICESTATUS$!$STATETYPE$!$SERVICEATTEMPT$
> 
> Then in the nrpe.cfg on the remote host:
> command[restart-sillydaemon]=/path/restart-sillydaemon $ARG1$ 
> $ARG2$ $ARG3$
> 
> i.e. I just want the ArgChain, !-delimited, separated into 
> ARGn variables,
> which nrpe could then send along said arguments to the commands.
> 
> Ah well.  If wishes were horses, then beggers would ride.
> 
> Consider it a feature request. :-)
> 
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