FAQ F0058 enhancement suggestion

[Greg Fenton]

I recently became responsible for a set of servers that use Nagios to
make sure each other is alive.

During a networking problem (VPN issues), I went to the CGI interface
to shut off notifications but got the "external commands cannot
execute" error.

I found the FAQ entry:

   http://www.nagios.org/faqs/viewfaq.php?faq_id=58

which points to the permissions for the users/groups and dirs of
"external commands".  This, however, did not answer the particular
problem I was facing.

When I finally broke down and started reading through the docs (I was
not involved in the initial config/install), I found out what "external
commands" means and found that they weren't enabled.

I have at least one suggestion from this experience.  The FAQ entry
would probably be better pointing at:

  http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/1_0/extcommands.html

rather than

  http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/1_0/commandfile.html


The big issue I ran into is one of terminology.  The term "external
command" makes sense now, but when I got started down this path my view
is that a CGI which is part of the installation would not be considered
an "external command" to the system.  I don't know if would confuse the
issue for others, but adding something like "(e.g. CGIs)" to the table
of contents entry for "External Commands" would also have saved me a
bit of reading.

Don't get me wrong....I don't mind having done the reading.  But if
this task had been handed off to a non-programmer sys-admin, I'm sure
they would have completely glazed over before getting past the section
"Installing Nagios".

Hope this proves helpful to some,
greg_fenton.

=====
Greg Fenton
greg_fenton at yahoo.com


	
		
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