NRPE reporting caution---Setup problem-NOT a b ug

[Voon, Ton]

Larry,

Thanks for this report. I think it sounds very serious - I think nrpe should
return CRITICAL if the plugin is not found. I've never been very fond of a
UNKNOWN status - it should either be red, yellow or green.

I've done a quick test with NRPE 1.8 and if I run check_nrpe -H xxx -c
check_ton with check_ton defined on the remote end pointing to a plugin that
does not exist, I get the output: "NRPE: Unable to read output" with a
return code of 1 - WARNING.

Can you provide a bit more detail of what was being run? What was the
check_nrpe command? What is the nrpe.cfg on the target box. What was the
output from NRPE? Was the SCSI disk failure causing an invocation of the
plugin to hang? Which version of nrpe were you using (I don't know of a
v1.2.5 - I'm using v1.8, and the latest is v2.0b3)?

Ton

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Larry Bills [SMTP:larry.bills at mci.com]
> Sent:	Monday, June 30, 2003 7:04 PM
> To:	nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
> Subject:	[Nagios-users] NRPE reporting caution---Setup problem-NOT a
> bug
> 
> This was with version 1.2.5 of NRPE but would appear you can bite
> yourself on all versions with this, as well as using NSCA for passive
> checks.
> 
> It involved an oversight on our part that bit us hard one afternoon. I
> am presenting it here to hopefully not have this happen to others.
> 
> We do not use the U or unknown feature of notifications for our
> alerting. All notifies/pages are the result of Critical, Warning or
> Recovery states.
> 
> A monitored server started acting strange, but found applications
> running ok. Checking Nagios, found that it was reporting UNKNOWN on all
> NRPE monitored processes on that server, yet no critical or other states
> of those not using NRPE, so no alarms were sent out.
> 
> Logging onto the Solaris server, found one of the scsi cards had failed,
> you got it, the one supporting NRPE plugins on the server, while the
> other partitions were fine.
> 
> Since NRPE loads its binary with configs into memory, it was running
> fine, however the plugins were not accessable due to the failure of the
> partition associated with them, hence the UNKNOWN reply.
> 
> Since we use the UNKNOWN notification for other uses, it was not
> possible to alert on it for the processes running on the server, and we
> did not want numerous alerts going out one for each process, so for a
> quick fix, instead of changing the NRPE code..which is not at fault
> here, we run a check against a NRPE check_dummy plugin and alert the
> server SA and the Nagios SA, if it returns UNKNOWN ...not great but
> works for a quick fix.
> 
> Larry Bills
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------
> This SF.Net email sponsored by: Free pre-built ASP.NET sites including
> Data Reports, E-commerce, Portals, and Forums are available now.
> Download today and enter to win an XBOX or Visual Studio .NET.
> http://aspnet.click-url.com/go/psa00100006ave/direct;at.asp_061203_01/01
> _______________________________________________
> Nagios-users mailing list
> Nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nagios-users
> ::: Please include Nagios version, plugin version (-v) and OS when
> reporting any issue. 
> ::: Messages without supporting info will risk being sent to /dev/null


This private and confidential e-mail has been sent to you by Egg.
The Egg group of companies includes Egg Banking plc
(registered no. 2999842), Egg Financial Products Ltd (registered
no. 3319027) and Egg Investments Ltd (registered no. 3403963) which
carries out investment business on behalf of Egg and is regulated
by the Financial Services Authority.  
Registered in England and Wales. Registered offices: 1 Waterhouse Square,
138-142 Holborn, London EC1N 2NA.
If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail and have
received it in error, please notify the sender by replying with
'received in error' as the subject and then delete it from your
mailbox.



-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email sponsored by: Free pre-built ASP.NET sites including
Data Reports, E-commerce, Portals, and Forums are available now.
Download today and enter to win an XBOX or Visual Studio .NET.
http://aspnet.click-url.com/go/psa00100006ave/direct;at.asp_061203_01/01
_______________________________________________
Nagios-users mailing list
Nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nagios-users
::: Please include Nagios version, plugin version (-v) and OS when reporting any issue. 
::: Messages without supporting info will risk being sent to /dev/null