Cannot open pipe: /bin/ping

[Brian Wilson]

We experienced a major outage today (>700 devices) and nagios seemed to
not be able to keep up with the notifications.  We had about 70 services
with UNKNOWN status with the message "Cannot open pipe:  /bin/ping".  I'm
assuming this is a ulimit problem because RAM, swap and CPU seem to be ok.
So here are the limits currently imposed for the nagios user:

$ ulimit -a
core file size        (blocks, -c) 0
data seg size         (kbytes, -d) unlimited
file size             (blocks, -f) unlimited
max locked memory     (kbytes, -l) unlimited
max memory size       (kbytes, -m) unlimited
open files                    (-n) 1024
pipe size          (512 bytes, -p) 8
stack size            (kbytes, -s) 8192
cpu time             (seconds, -t) unlimited
max user processes            (-u) 256
virtual memory        (kbytes, -v) unlimited


Does anyone have any recommendations for changing any of the above.
Nagios is the only thing running on our machines, so it should be able to
have whatever resources it wants.

Anyone have a good way of changing these limits for the nagios user?  I'm
assuming this would have to be done in the startup script.

Thanks in advance,
Brian

--
Brian Wilson  <wilson at ncsu.edu>      Network Analyst
Communication Technologies, ATD      W: 919.513.3472
North Carolina State University      www.ncstate.net


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