The Nagios: Reloaded (Rewriting Nagios)

[Andreas Ericsson]

Jeff Rodriguez wrote:
> Controlled by one company? Perhaps I should point out that C# is an ECMA 
> standard: http://msdn.microsoft.com/net/ecma/ C# is as controlled by one 
> company as C is.
> 

Yup. Believe the MS website. That's what I would do. The specifications 
documents for C# were written by Microsoft, HP and Intel. Mainly Mother 
Theresa kind of companies so they're probably just out to save the world 
and not a bit interested in making money.

> As far as bugs go, it's harder to accidentally write bugs into your code 
> with C# vs C.

"Nothing is foolproof, because fools are so ingenious."
Bad code is bad code, independant of the programming language. Besides, 
the debugging utils for C# doesn't exactly make me cheer.

> C# is a much more easily maintained language, tracking 
> down bugs when they occur is much easier because of things like 
> exceptions instead of good ol' segfaults.
> 

Actually, the unix sighandling system lets you trap sigsegv (and any 
other signal with exception of SIGKILL, unless the pid is 1) and do 
whatever you like with it, so writing your own exception-handling 
routine won't be a problem at all. The issue with that is that it adds 
mostly unnecessary code that slows execution down and bloats the 
program. Since C is the de facto language of choice for a plethora of 
operating systems, slowdowns in the language itself is simply unacceptable.

> The nagios.cfg as an XML file would be just fine IMHO, there's not that 
> much that you configure and you really hardly ever change it.

But why? If you want people to USE your program you should go with the 
template-based format that exists today, instead of having to design 
tools to convert the files from the existing, familiar format to XML 
(which is terribly cumbersome to edit manually). The config-frontend 
won't be there from the start you know.

> Hosts.cfg 
> and services, extinfo, etc should definitely be in a DB, which I've 
> planned.
> 

It has been thought of, implemented and discarded.

> Jeff
> 

I seriously think you will have minimal to no success with this project 
because of the following reasons in no particular order;

* It requires Unix-users to install Mono.
* MS has had nothing to do with Mono (it was Novell's initiative), so 
they are likely to do with C# what they did to the once source-portable 
C, namely write their own extensions which are highly platform dependant 
and most likely necessary to give the language any real value in an 
attempt to lure opensource-developers to work with MS platforms.
* Mono had its first claimed-to-be stable release one week ago (June 
30th 2004).
* Mono offers little real value to unix-systems (MS-controlled .NET 
framework), so it's not very likely to catch on in a terrible hurry.
* Reinventing the wheel when it's already working is just plain dumb.

> Aristedes Maniatis wrote:
> 
>> On 07/07/2004, at 11:50 AM, Jeff Rodriguez wrote:
>>
>>>    * Rewrite in C# for all the reasons one would use a managed
>>>      language, Linux boxen will use Mono of course!
>>
>>
>>
>> I am unclear how it helps to take a solid working tool written in an 
>> open language and rewrite it in a language controlled by one company, 
>> introduce a whole new set of bugs.
>>
>> Wouldn't you be better directing your energy toward improving the 
>> existing product?
>>
>>>    * Use XML files for main configuration to ease the creation of
>>>      configuration tools.
>>
>>
>>
>> Please no. XML files are a pain to edit by hand and configuration 
>> tools are really unnecessary to edit a simple file like nagios.cfg. If 
>> you mean files like hosts.cfg, then perhaps you should contribute 
>> toward the work to get those back into an SQL database (as I 
>> understand that SQL support has been dropped in version 2).
>>
>> Ari Maniatis
>>
>>

-- 
Sourcerer / Andreas Ericsson
OP5 AB
+46 (0)733 709032
andreas.ericsson at op5.se


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