[Pkg-nagios-devel] default configuration audit

[Marc Haber]

Hi,

On Sat, Feb 04, 2006 at 07:38:54AM -0500, sean finney wrote:
> - reorder/recomment the various cfg_dir/cfg_file comments/directives in
>   nagios.conf to make more sense to the "new reader"

What is the recommended order?

> - the following files go in /var/cache, but i'm wondering if they
>   should go in /var/lib:
>   - comment_file=/var/cache/nagios2/comments.dat
>   - downtime_file=/var/cache/nagios2/downtime.dat

Yes, these should live over reboots, and it is not nice to lose them.
So, they should be in /var/lib

> - any reason for log_archive_path=/var/lib/nagios2/archives
>   instead of /var/log/nagios2/archives?

No particular reason. Go ahead and change it (it seems to be unused on
my box anyway).

> - should we change date_format from us to iso8601?

I'd say yes.

> - oh, look: p1_file=/usr/sbin/p1.pl  <- so we can change that afterall.

Yes, but we still don't know whether it makes sense to call it from
the command line or not.

> - should we enable regex matching by default?

I don't think so.

> - remove redundant (to the nagios-plugins-defined) checkcommands from
>   checkcommands.cfg

Yes.

> - conf.d file numbering isn't necessary, the order is still arbitrarily
>   random (based on the results of getdirent).

Yes, you're right, and nagios doesn't care about order. I'd still
vouch for keeping the package name in the file name.

> - a couple more out of the box timeperiods (never, standard work hours,
>   weekends, etc)
> - contacts can be templated

Go ahead.

> - contacts and contactgroups are combined in the same file, which is
>   nice.. maybe we should do the same for hosts/services.

I think that depends very much on the opinion of the local admin. On
my main nagios installation, I have services connected with host
groups and control which services are checked for a host by putting
the host in the respective host group:

define service {
        name                            defaultping
        use                             generic-service
        hostgroup_name                  defaultping
        service_description             defaultping
        check_command                   check_ping!100.0,20%!500.0,60%
}

define service {
        name   				imap
        use                             generic-service
        hostgroup_name                  imap
        service_description             imap
        check_command                   check_imap
}


define hostgroup {
        hostgroup_name  defaultping
        alias           hosts that need to respond to ping with normal latency
}

define hostgroup {
        hostgroup_name  imap
        alias           hosts that run a imap server
}

define host {
        use                     mh-host
        host_name               mh-torres
        hostgroups              defaultping, smtp, http, ssh
        alias                   torres.zugschlus.de
        address                 217.151.83.1
        parents                 ar0.muc.de.tnib.net
}

> - our config files could have a comment at the top that says "this is the
>   default config supplied by debian, if you'd like to change it feel
>   free to do so, but if you want to *add* to it we suggest you make life
>   easier for yourself by using additional files in the conf.d directory
>   or elsewhere".   at least for the template config files.

I advise not doing so. People are bound to change the files and not
change the comment.

> - for localhost's configs:
>   - we can move more config options up into the template
>   - PING is useless because we get it from check-host-alive, and
>     if localhost isn't responding to ping the nagios server probably
>     isn't running either :)
> - notification_interval for hosts and services should *definitely* be 0
>   by default.

I don't care either way, you have more nagios experience.

> - example hostextinfo 

I still don't understand hostextinfo. It looks a lot less flexible,
and clumsy to configure. See my message on nagios-users dated
yesterday.

> and escalations configuration?
> - hostgroups?

Do you think that we should deviate that far from upstream's
configuration? Or do we have a chance to get our configuration adopted
by upstream?

Greetings
Marc

-- 
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