Nagios VM Player?

[Hans Engelen]

I have to agree with Brian here.

The timedrift issue is present on VMware too. There are a fair number of
documents on the matter on the VMware site and it is a major showstopper
indeed. Possibly they will get this fixed and sorted out someday but I don't
think they are quite there yet. The latency issue is a problem too on
vmware. That being said the VMware player is a good way of demonstrating a
Nagios setup. It just is not a good production/permanent solution.

I am not sure I understand where your problem lies though. I am guessing it
lies with the installation of the OS and Nagios & Co by non-linux-familiars.
A better choice in this case might be to prepare a fully setup image that
has everything presetup for them. Something along the lines of a Ghost image
maybe. Maybe even a live-cd that keeps it's configs on say a USB-stick (a
old 32mb stick would be more then enough) or even a floppy disk (if theres
not too much to monitor). The latter would even make it really easy for you
to send them updates. Just prepare a new Live-CD with the latest
Nagios/Plugins/Graphical Nagios Config tools and they would be all sorted
out. You could even go sofar as to actually make the whole Linux/Nagios
install live on a USB stick of 128 or 256 mb. Most recent machines can boot
from USB sticks too now and I have one like it for whenever I want to boot
my PC at work into a linux OS. This way you could have them use a cheap
diskless machine even which could run extremely silently.

As you can see, plenty of options that don't have to cost much at all.
VMware is nice in that way that it does complete hardware abstraction but
it's not that much of a problem anyway on Linux. Most hardware is
automatically detected and setup already and the few things that are not can
easily be reconfigured. In fact on live-cd's like Knoppix and
DamnSmallLinux even that is done automatically (think of the X server
config).

Come to think about it, EchelonLinux (based on DamnSmallLinux) already has
Nagios on-board as a live-cd (along with a few other network tools). It
might not be exactly what you need but would probably be a good start with
minimal modification needed to suit your goal.

Cheers,
Hans

On 2/25/06, Brian Desmond <brian at briandesmond.com> wrote:
>
> I had Nagios going on a MS Virtual Server and the lack of additions
> caused a lot of issues. The continuous cock drift caused false alarm
> pages constantly, plugin timeouts, and other problems. VMWare with the
> additions hopefully won't have this issue, but, fundamentally the VMs
> are prone to the same issue. I was also seeing much higher ping
> latencies (5ms vs .5 ms generally). Moved to a piece of hardware and
> works fine now.
>
> Thanks,
> Brian Desmond
> brian at briandesmond.com
>
> c - 312.731.3132
>
>
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