Where have the cgi gone?

[Paul L. Allen]

WDougallJR at nwdtc.com writes: 

> On those new cars how do the petrol attendants learn where the filler cap
> is?  Do they RTFM?  No, they politely ask the driver where it is.

The ones I have encountered are smart enough to LOOK for the filler cap.
It's fairly obvious what one looks like, it's only the placement that
changes. 

> Are ISP's and IT groups the only people you can think of that might 
> benefit from having a Nagios installation?

I believe that any enterprise large enough to REQUIRE monitoring services
either has an in-house IT group or contracts the work to a specialist
company. 

> Ever think that maybe a warehouse, print shop, small/large grocery store,
> local post office, schools, and libraries might be interested in it?

They might be.  I can imagine a small grocery store or post office with
one or two computers buying another computer and installing Linux on
it all by themselves because they somehow stumbled across Nagios.  I
can imagine it, but the picture that accompanies it is of a pig flying. 

My local library, in a very small town, had eight PCs for internet access
the last time I looked.  The county council's IT department supplied
them.  The county council's IT department looks after support and
maintenance of them, not the librarian.  The county council's IT
department is very large but is smart enough to know that if it
doesn't have the necessary expertise for a task then it contracts it
out.  BTW, the librarian notices if computers die because somebody
attempting to use it reports a problem, so the librarian phones the
county council.  What need does the library have for remote monitoring?
None whatsoever. 

> Otherwise they may not have the budget for a *nix admin but may
> have a real need for such software.

In which case they contract the work out to somebody who knows what
they're doing.  This is what sensible people do.  They look at the
cost of a commercial monitoring product on Windows, they look at the
cost of getting somebody to install and configure Nagios for them (if
they've heard of it) then they decide which to go with. 

> I don't remember reading anywhere in the doc's that you had to be an
> *nix admin to install this.

I didn't read anything in the docs saying that you don't have to be
clinically brain-dead to install it.  The docs take some things for
granted, like if you find Nagios somehow and have a need for it then
you either know enough about *nix to install it yourself or you
contract the task out to somebody who does. 

> So guess what, in an effort to save money the manager/teacher/business 
> owner/maybe even your gas station attendant gets to install it and
> configure it.  Oh BTW he/she never went to college for software devel or 
> support.  A.K.A. clueless.

Which pretty much describes the people we have installed Nagios for.
Except they have enough of a clue to know that if they can barely use
Windows then they have no chance installing Nagios for themselves. 

> May not of even heard of google.  But through some luck he/she
> stumbled upon this excellent cost effective software.

Without a search engine to help them, right.  And decided to install
Linux without a clue how to use it.  And somehow managed to teach himself
or herself how to do things like cd to directories, unpack tarballs,
use a *nix command-line editor like vi to read the installation
instructions, etc.  Somebody who doesn't know *nix but manages to teach
himself or herself all that is also quite capable of figuring out the
rest, unless he or she is lazy and wants somebody else to do it all
at no cost. 

> Why does he/she not deserve free support on free software from a free 
> list.

Turn that around.  Why DOES he or she DESERVE free support about *nix
on a list which is dedicated to Nagios?  Why should Nagios users have
to put up with teaching somebody *nix and Apache almost from scratch when
there exist lists with those things as their aim?  Why should even this
clueless, deserving, person you have posited, not be led down the path of
figuring stuff out for himself or herself by pointing out that he should
first read the documentation, then the FAQs, then google search before
even thinking of asking here?  Why is it wrong to guide him towards
thinking about the problem himself before posting here? 

Why, above all, if this person (whom, in your hypothesis, had never
encountered *nix before deciding to build a *nix box to install
Nagios on) has managed to figure out the *nix filesystem to the point where
he or she can cd to /usr/local/nagios/etc and also figured out a *nix text
editor to the point where they can edit the configuration files, are they
so clueless as to be unable to figure out that "cannot stat
/usr/local/nagios/sbin/statusmap.cgi" means they ought to at least cd to
/usr/local/nagios/sbin and take a look around?  And the answer to that one
is the guy is a sponge.  He wants to get away with doing as little as
possible by getting people here to do it for him. 

> Why can't the animated paperclip tell us that?  If it's such rudimentary
> info as you make it out to be then why not have the magic paperclip give 
> us that answer and get on with the world?  Instead you would rather waste 
> your time telling us how the world turns.

I would prefer to give people the tools that allow them to answer the
easy questions themselves so that they only come here when they have
difficult questions.  You and some others appear to wish to answer
any question, no matter that it is far more appropriately-asked elsewhere,
no matter that anyone who can figure out how to install Nagios ought to
be able to figure out the answer himself, and no matter that the person
asking it wants a free ride because he's too lazy to put any thought into
the matter.  "Why isn't it working?"  "What does this Apache log mean?"
"Why don't I have these CGIs?"  All in the space of about an hour. 

Although I mentioned it in a previous post, I will again give a URL
that you ought to read: 

 <URL: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html > 

The author of that page has documented the hacker culture back to its
beginnings, has been involved in the hacker culture almost as long,
has documented the norms of the hacker culture (such as the smart way
to ask questions on mailing lists), and is one of the founders of the
Open Software Foundation.  He is highly regarded by Tim O'Reilly,
Larry Wall, Linus Torvalds and many others (without whom there would
be no Linux and probably no Nagios).  I suggest you follow that URL
and read what he has to say. 

-- 
Paul Allen
Softflare Support 




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