I don't understand the check_by_ssh plugin

[David Dyer-Bennet]

I'm running Nagios 2.10 (the Centos 5.2 packaged version).

I want to do some small local checks on each of a bunch of real and
virtual servers, and I really don't want to have to set up Nagios (even a
minimal install) on each of them just to check uptime, load average, and
disk space.  (Mostly I'm testing externally visible services on them.)

The documentation on this plugin doesn't seem to tell me anything about
what it does with the part of the command output it processes (I see that
the -S and -E commands let me prune what command output it looks at).

When I run it from the command line simply, I just get the output of the
remote command (as if the plugin was just passing it through).  I see that
I could cause it to produce errors based on how long it takes, but nothing
about how to actually use the output.

Then I see some tantalizing hints about "passive" mode, where it writes a
file that seems to show it doing some parsing and making decisions based
on the data (in the example).  But I can't get the example to produce a
non-empty file from the command line.

So I'm pretty sure I'm missing something about how to use this plugin in
the first place, or what it's supposed to let me do, or some such.

Or, if the answer to what I'm trying to do is some other approach
entirely, I'd settle for enlightenment about that!

Help?
-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info


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