flushing alerts queue

[Marc Powell]

Please always respond on list. More below --

On Jul 23, 2009, at 3:20 PM, Eugene Vilensky wrote:

>> Nagios doesn't queue alerts. They're handed to the mail system in  
>> real
>> time. If the mail system doesn't accept them, they're gone forever.
>
> Hi Marc,
>
> I could be wrong, but this doesn't appear to be true in my particular
> experience in this specific instance.

Nagios doesn't queue messages. There's no saying it could be wrong  
because it's just not possible. There's just nothing built in to do  
it. Once the notification command quits, nagios moves on. It doesn't  
know or care if it was successful or not.  In your case, the mail  
system _did_ accept them because of the way Postfix handles locally  
sent mail. It doesn't need to be running to accept and queue those  
messages.

> I had postfix up for 2 minutes
> and generated 1700 alerts (Nagios 3.1.2)...there are not enough
> hostchecks and servicechecks to generate this much activity so fast!

Which strengthens, not weakens, my argument.

- Your notification command is probably set to /bin/mail. Nagios  
submits the notification to /bin/mail sometime during your testing.  
Nagios is completely out of the picture now as the message was  
accepted by the mail system.
- /bin/mail passes it on to Postfix via the sendmail->sendmail.postfix  
symlink.
- sendmail.postfix sends the message to the postdrop program which
- dumps the message directly into the postfix queues, regardless of  
whether the postfix daemon is running or not.
- You (re)started postfix and it delivered all the messages it had in  
it's queues. 1700 messages in 2 minutes is trivial to deliver locally  
from queue.

Easy enough to verify though. In your recent maillog, do you see  
submission by nagios and then delivery by postfix for all those  
messages or just the delivery by postfix?

--
Marc


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