Plugins

[Michael Tucker]

On Wednesday, January 28, 2004, at 10:13  AM, Thilanka wrote:

> I posted this question but I have not seen it on the mailing list. 
> Hopefully
> this is not dumb question even. Do you have to compile the plugins on 
> the
> remote hosts or can you just copy the plugins that you have compiled 
> on the
> nagios host and put them in a directory (e.g. 
> /usr/local/nagios/libexec) Now, I
> am thinking that plugins will have to compiled on the remote host in 
> order for
> it to make it compatible with OS of the remote host, but the on the 
> otherhand
> if you have to compile the plugins on the remote host wihtout copying 
> them from
> the Nagios host, I can see some admins frowning on that idea if the 
> remote host
> is in production. Can someone please clear this out for me? Thank you 
> for all
> your help. This is the second attempt at posting this question. I hope 
> there
> are no filters to filter out dumb questions, in case this is a dumb 
> one.
>
> Thilanka
>

Thilanka, I'm pretty sure that I saw a couple of replies to your 
question. I have deleted them, but the answer to your question is this:

If the machine you compile them on, and the machine you copy them to, 
are *exactly* the same type of hardware (Intel, Sun, whatever) running 
*exactly* the same operating system with *exactly* the same level of 
patches, and *exactly* the same shared libraries installed, and 
*exactly* the same version of Perl (for those plugins that depend on 
Perl), then... and usually *only* then... you can simply copy the 
binaries over from the machine you compiled them on (a development 
machine, for example) to the machine you want to monitor (a production 
machine, for example).

However, if the hardware architecture is different, or the operating 
systems, patches, shared libraries and other dependencies (such as 
Perl) aren't *exactly* the same, then your plugins aren't going to work 
(or, at best, will try to work but won't run correctly).

If the hardware is the same (Intel, for example), but the operating 
systems are different (Linux on one, Windows 2000 on the other), then 
it isn't going to work. If the hardware is different, forget it; it 
isn't going to work.

My theory on dumb questions, by the way: it's better to ask them, than 
to do something stupid.

Better yet, do a little independent research. Not to put you down, but 
your question indicates that you don't know much about how computers 
work, and for some reason have been stuck with having to figure out how 
to make Nagios work (which demands an extremely high and comprehensive 
understanding of how computers, operating systems and networks work). 
That's a big step for you to have to make, and you have my sympathy.

I would seriously suggest that you take a course at your local 
university or college in computer fundamentals. And read some books. I 
highly recommend any books by O'Reilly (http://www.oreilly.com/). You 
might start with a general book on Unix, such as "Learning Red Hat 
Linux" (O'Reilly), or "Unix System Administration Handbook" (Prentice 
Hall). Then this stuff will make a lot more sense to you. And you won't 
have to ask dumb questions. :-)

Good luck to you. We were all new at this once upon a time.

Yours,
Michael



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