[Pkg-nagios-devel] default configuration audit

[Marc Haber]

Hi,

On Sat, Feb 04, 2006 at 08:42:01AM -0500, sean finney wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 04, 2006 at 02:02:11PM +0100, Marc Haber wrote:
> > > - 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.
> 
> well, since we don't know, i'd opt for defaulting to not having it
> in /usr/sbin.  if it breaks something, i'm sure someone will complain :)

Agreed. Saves us from writing man pages.

> > > - 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:
> 
> yes, this in fact how i do it as well.  i don't think there's a bettter
> method that doesn't involve a complicated makefile or some wonky
> perl/ruby script to autogenerate them.  i think what i actually meant in
> my head was "for hosts and hostgroups", and somehow that was
> mistranslated by my fingers.

I don't, however, see how we can transport this to the default config
where there is only one host defined.

> you're right that "this is the default config" woudl be misleading if they
> did modify it... perhaps a better choice of wording could be used.
> my point is that they have the right to edit it as much as they want,
> but they will get less conffile conflicts in future upgrades
> if they simply use seperate files for additional config.

>From my experience with exim4, comments like this are only likely to
confuse people into thinking that editing files without a comment like
"you're free to edit" is dangerous.

> > > - 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.
> 
> yes... personally i think the hostextinfo should have been integrated into
> the host objects themselves a long time ago.  i can't see why it
> shouldn't, anyway.

I agree here. Good that I am not alone ;)

Looks like it's too late to convince Ethan to do so :-(

> but in any case, you should be able to assign the hostextinfo
> to hostgroups using hostgroup_name instead of host_name.

That's at least not documented, but it seems to work, thanks!

> i think for escalations we'd probably leave a few sample configs
> commented out for reference, as it's one of those things that
> is often fairly specific to the site...  
> 
> as for hostgroups, i don't think it's really deviating from upstream
> to have a couple hostgroups defined.  i was thinking something like an
> "all" wildcard group, maybe a single service-focused group (like
> imap-servers or something) as an example, and/or then maybe a few commented
> out example groups.

Agreed.

Greetings
Marc

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