[Pkg-nagios-devel] Bug#705900: check_ping fail if host do not have IPv6 address

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

Package:  nagios-plugins-basic
Version:  1.4.16-1
Severity: important
User:     debian-edu at lists.debian.org
Usertags: debian-edu

In Debian Edu, we use check_ping from the nagios-plugins-basic package
to check if a host is responding.  The Nagios configuration is generated
using the sitesummary package.

With the Wheezy version of Debian Edu, the check_ping nagios plugin
started to fail, and I tracked it down to the fact that check_ping try
to use ping6 to reach the host in question, while earlier it used ping.

The DNS host name in question only resolve to an IPv4 address, but ping6
is tried nevertheless:

  root at tjener:~# host tjener.intern
  tjener.intern has address 10.0.2.2
  root at tjener:~# /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_ping -H tjener.intern -w 10,10% -c 10,10%
  /bin/ping6 -n -U -w 10 -c 5 tjener.intern
  CRITICAL - Could not interpret output from ping command
  root at tjener:~# 

The issue seem to be similar to the ones reported in 
<URL: http://bugs.debian.org/597068 > and
<URL: http://bugs.debian.org/629640 >, but those reports seem to be
related to problems with hosts where AAAA records are present.  This is
not the case here.

Could you please change check_ping to use IPv4 ping if no AAAA entry is
present in DNS?

-- 
Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen