Monitor Gentoo portage

[Hari Sekhon]

Matthias Kellermann wrote:
> Hari Sekhon schrieb:
>> Matthias Kellermann wrote:
>>> Hari Sekhon schrieb:
>>>> Matthias Kellermann wrote:
>>>>> Hi list,
>>>>>
>>>>> does anyone know a Nagios plugin for monitoring Gentoo's portage 
>>>>> for updates? A quick google search did not give any results
>>>> That sounds like a good idea and one that I am quite interested in 
>>>> since I run a lot of gentoo servers.
>>>>
>>>> Could you please elaborate on what exactly you want this plugin to 
>>>> do, perhaps I can write it...
>>>>
>>>> -h
>>>
>>> The plugin should check the output of "emerge -upD --newuse world" 
>>> for updates. It's been a while since I've used Gentoo on a daily 
>>> basis so I'm not sure if the output of the above command shows any 
>>> difference between critical and non-critical updates.
>>>
>>> I wrote a similar plugin for FreeBSD where I use portaudit to see if 
>>> there are any critical packages on the system. This way I can divide 
>>> between critical packages and normal updates and give the right 
>>> state back to Nagios (1 = non-critical, yellow / 2 = critical, red).
>> When you say critical and non-critical updates do you mean the 
>> severity of the security package announcements? Ie. whether is a 
>> remote exploitable service and might be considered Critical or 
>> whether it takes some previous user account to elevate privilege and 
>> therefore is not as severe and only "Important" or "Warning" in Nagios.
>>
>> I take it that you do not mean any old package that has updates or 
>> the thing would be permanently triggered?
>>
>> I've just had a look at this and it doesn't look like it 
>> distinguishes between security upgrades deemed Critical/Non-Critical. 
>> So I guess it would be an all-or-nothing Critical/OK result.
>>
>> Any other ideas on this are welcome.
>>
>> I'll have a go at writing this since I think this is a neat idea and 
>> I have a lot of gentoo to test it on here.
>>
>> -h
>
> critical update: fixes a security hole (nagios state: critical)
> non-critical update: just a new version with new features etc. (nagios 
> state: warning)
>
> Thanks for your help and if you need any help for this plugin don't 
> hesitate to ask me.
Ok thanks.

Just out of curiosity, why would you want to know if there are new 
version of a package available? There may be so many packages on a 
server, that there is always some update. Do you intend to continuously 
update the system for things which have no benefit?

eg. on a relatively light server with 174 packages, the odds of a newer 
version of some small irrelevent program having gotten an update for 
some feature you don't even know about is quite high I think.

Perhaps that kind of thing is better left for a switch option as I think 
most people really wouldn't want to be bothered about that.

Do you, for example, update all packages on your gentoo servers all the 
time? I would think that this would destabilize your server by 
constantly changing things...?

What do you think?

Everybody else, please let us know your thoughts too.

-h

-- 
Hari Sekhon


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