Passive service checks via NSCA and required check command defini tion

Ralph.Grothe at itdz-berlin.de Ralph.Grothe at itdz-berlin.de
Mon Aug 8 13:14:34 CEST 2005


Hello,

I have a question regarding the nagios server configuration for
passive checks.

I built NSCA for both the OS of my Nagios server (i.e. AIX 4.3.3)
and the remote servers' OS where
I wish to run passive checks on (i.e. mainly HP-UX 11.11)
I also made sure to compile and link against libmcrypt after
having read the security note.

On the remote host I configured NSCA to be started by inetd, and
configured nsca.cfg with a password
and tripple DES.
(btw, which cipher would be more suited in relating security vs.
performance?)

Running a few passive checks manually I could verify by doing a
cat on the FIFO ~nagios/var/rw/nagios.cmd
of the Nagios server that the passive check result got written to
the FIFO.

Then I was a bit puzzled what to define as check_command for the
asynchronous service,
as the pre-flight check correctly objected that this was
attribute (as a required one) was missing.

I came up with the following hack that seems to be working well,
but I'm unsure if this was also the officially "supported" way
since I haven't found this point being treated in the doc.

After having searched the libexec dir for appropiate sounding
plug-ins I came accross
check_dummy, which I thought was for cases like this.
(the help screen of check_dummy wasn't too revealing about its
intended usage, as usual)

Thus I defined this in checkcommands.cfg

# Placeholder for Passive Checks

define command {
    command_name        passive-check-pad
    command_line        $USR1$/check_dummy 0 "won't do active
checks"
}


and it is called from this service definition


define service {
    use                         generic-service
    service_description         samos-hpva-state
    host_name                   samos
    passive_checks_enabled      1
    active_checks_enabled       0
    check_command               passive-check-pad
    contact_groups              samosadmin
}


I have the passive check feeding the Nagios FIFO every hour by a
cronjob from the remote host.

Looking at the Nagios webinterface everything seems to be working
perfectly,
but I have this sneaking suspicion that I missed something.





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