[Pkg-nagios-devel] Bug#731163: nagios3-core: Please backport fix for upstream bug: #375 - Freshness expiration never reached

[Matt Raso-Barnett]

Package: nagios3-core
Version: 3.4.1-3
Severity: normal
Tags: upstream

Dear Maintainer,

We are affected by the following frustrating bug that has been recorded
upstream in: 
http://tracker.nagios.org/view.php?id=375

As stated in the upstream bug notes, the bug is fixed by changing one
comparison operator, corrected in r2668 in their SVN repo: 
http://sourceforge.net/p/nagios/svn/2668/
or commit b795b3 in their git repo:
http://sourceforge.net/p/nagios/nagioscore/ci/b795b375b6e5293fd2266db54a39234cee89d8f6/

This fix has been released in 3.5.1 of nagios core:
http://www.nagios.org/projects/nagioscore/history/core-3x

and according to here,
http://sources.debian.net/src/nagios3/3.4.1-5/base/checks.c 
it is not already in the backported 3.4.1-5 version of nagios in Debian.

For us, the bug is triggered because we frequently reload the nagios daemon for
configuration updates via puppet, and this resets the passive service freshness
threshold to start from the time nagios was last restarted, instead of from the
time the service was last checked. As we reload nagios so frequently and have a
number of passive services with long freshness thresholds, it means that most
these services can never reach their freshness expiration, and so problems are
being missed.

We will be changing our servers to not reload nagios as frequently in the hope
that we don't trigger this bug as frequently as we do now, but since it is such
a simple fix, and clearly a bug (as the logic of the code is clearly wrong
without this change), I wondered whether this change could possibly be
backported to the 3.4.X line in wheezy so that we don't have to wait for a new
version of nagios to benefit?

Kind regards,

Matt Raso-Barnett

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 7.2
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages nagios3-core depends on:
ii  libc6           2.13-38
ii  libperl5.14     5.14.2-21+deb7u1
ii  nagios3-common  3.4.1-3
ii  perl            5.14.2-21+deb7u1

nagios3-core recommends no packages.

Versions of packages nagios3-core suggests:
ii  nagios-nrpe-plugin  2.13-3

-- no debconf information