execute command as root user

[Lars Stavholm]

Martin Koeck wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I know this is more OS related and not so much nagios related, but I 
> thought maybe somebody has stumbled across this:
> 
> I need, on a critical failure that is trapped by nagios (this works for 
> me), to restart an application which I usually restart as root user on 
> this machine.
> 
> To be specific: Tomcat is giving up work now and then on this machine, I 
> can trap it, and need to restart it. Normally I do this by 
> /etc/init.d/tomcat restart -- but I need to be root for this, so nagios 
> cannot do this automatically for me, because it runs as nagios user.
> 
> What is the best way to approach this ? Changing the owner of the 
> tomcat-related startup files so that nagios can do it ? Writing a file 
> on-critical-error and restarting tomcat (as a cron-job), whenever that 
> file exists ? Something else ?

sudo and nagios eventhandler should do it. For security reasons,
be as specific as possible in your sudo configuration, e.g.:

[snip]
nagios  ALL=NOPASSWD:/etc/init.d/tomcat restart
[snip]

You'll have to look in nagios doco for eventhandlers,
i've never used them.

Another alternative, that we use here successfully, is
to use monit from http://www.tildeslash.com/monit.
Works like a charm and is a bit easier to setup than nagios
eventhandlers (I think:). In monit you define simple criterias
and subsequent actions, like restart. For example: memory out
of bounds: restart, process missing: start, etc.

Hope this helps
/Lars


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