Problems with FreeBSD and Nagios

[Andreas Ericsson]

Jonathan Call wrote:
> 
> Given your ideas and some google work I seem to have found my problem: 
> 
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2005-August/013247.ht
> ml
> 
> Not a pretty discussion. :(
> 

Nope. Definitely not.

The problem for Nagios is that threading was added after the fact so 
nagios actually breaks some of the *strong* recommendations on what to 
do and what not to do in a threaded application after a fork().

The problem for *BSD and their thread implementation of the thread 
library is that Nagios actually works everywhere but on *BSD, and it 
*often* works there too, but not always. This "often-but-not-always" is 
usually a sign of a broken implementation, although exactly 
"often-but-not-always" is a sign of the errors you'll run into when you 
do what Nagios does post-fork().

I don't know of any other program that has the same problem on *BSD, but 
it would be interesting to see if there's a common pattern so one can 
pinpoint the exact pattern that causes the lock contention and races. It 
would, from a practical point of view, be best to patch it in the 
library, as that is a fix that would work for all possible future 
problems as well, although it's technically more correct to fix it in 
Nagios.

Ugly discussion indeed.


> I'll try using a non SMP kernel to see it might help. If it doesn't this
> pretty much renders Nagios useless on FreeBSD. (Which makes me wonder
> why they even bother maintaining it in ports?)
> 

Out of curiousity, do you use passive checks, active checks or a mix of 
both in your setup?

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231

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