NSCA enhancements for larger output

Ton Voon ton.voon at opsera.com
Tue Jan 20 22:07:48 CET 2009


Hi!

I'm looking into increasing the size of the NSCA information. At the  
moment, the plugin_output part is, by default, 512 bytes long and with  
Nagios 3 it makes sense to try and increase that amount (though I'm  
not looking to include linefeeds, just increased plugin and  
performance data).

I want to do it by updating NSCA, preferably with backwards  
compatibility, rather than switch to an entirely new method.

The technique that we used for increasing NRPE's output while keeping  
backwards compatibility (http://opsview-blog.opsera.com/dotorg/2008/08/enhancing-nrpe.html 
) basically works by sending a special flag to say that more data is  
coming. However, this won't work with NSCA because we use nsca with -- 
single and, with multiple send_nscas running at the same time, packets  
could get intermingled.

So I'm wondering if anyone has good ideas on how this could work? I  
think that a variable packet size is probably best (with the minimum  
as NSCA currently sends, for compatibility, and a maximum at compile  
time) with that single packet holding all the plugin check  
information. However, I don't have much C network coding experience.  
Are there are good examples to work from? Will this technique even  
work (will NSCA's encryption change packet sizes?).

Ton


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