[Pkg-nagios-devel] Bug#551011: nagios-plugins-basic: several plugins depend on locale in performance data

[Moritz Both]

Package: nagios-plugins-basic
Version: 1.4.12-5
Severity: normal
Tags: l10n

Several plugins produce performance data formatted depending on
the locale under which they run.

Performance data is supposed to be machine-readable and should
come in a fixed format, not depending on the locale.

Plugins affected are at least: check_ldap, check_ntp, 
check_nt, check_dns. (Other plugins once were affected
and have already been fixed, like check_load and check_ping.)

As a result of this bug, nagiosgrapher cannot interpret the
performance data of these plugins in a reliable way. 

Note that nagios will run under the "C" locale if started
at boot time via init, but under the system locale if
manually started from a shell, so the results are
unpredictable.

In bug #509359, a variation of this problem was discussed. It ended
with the suggestion to run nagios under the system locale and
everything would be fine. I would disagree with that because it means
that you would have to change configuration files (for nagios and
nagiosgrapher) when the system locale is changed. The rest of my
systems continue to run without change when I change the system
locale.

In bug #531716, basically the same argumentation was used: You
get what you configure. To me this philosophy is wrong.

Moritz


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 5.0.3
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-2-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 at euro, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 at euro (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages nagios-plugins-basic depends on:
ii  iputils-ping            3:20071127-1     Tools to test the reachability of 
ii  libc6                   2.7-18           GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libssl0.9.8             0.9.8g-15+lenny5 SSL shared libraries
ii  procps                  1:3.2.7-11       /proc file system utilities
ii  ucf                     3.0016           Update Configuration File: preserv

nagios-plugins-basic recommends no packages.

Versions of packages nagios-plugins-basic suggests:
ii  nagios3                   3.0.6-4~lenny2 A host/service/network monitoring 

-- no debconf information