Suppressing notifications for a host based on another host for on-demand host checks

[John P. Rouillard]

Hello all:

I am running nagios 2.0 and have a single host represented twice
within nagios. It has two names: a.example.com, a.pub.example.com

When I (and others) take a.example.com down I disable notifications
for the host and it's services. However I often forget to do the same
for it's other instance a.pub.example.com (in reality we have 4 or 5
names for some hosts corresponding to different IP addresses).

I was hoping that host dependencies would help in this case by
simply making a.pub.example.com depend on a.example.com. Then if
a.example.com was down the notification for a.pub.example.com wouldn't
go out and neither would the service errors on a.pub.example.com
(because the host was down).

However it doesn't work that way according to the manual. Only
scheduled host checks (not the on-demand checks caused by the loss of
services on a.pub.example.com) are affected by the host
dependencies.

I can't use parent directives either because these interfaces are on
separate networks and using the parent directives would:

  1) create a link that doesn't exist (the nagios server is multi-homed)

  2) create a loop in the parent graph that would cause nagios to fail.


One way I thought of to do this is to use a new host check plugin for
a.pub.example.com that returns "unreachable (2)" if a.example.com was
in an error state. Setting a.pub.example.com to "unreachable" should
also suppress the notifications done by the core, and the dependency
can be defined statically in the nagios config files rather than
dynamically in the plugin. Something like:

  check_host_with_dependency -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -P $HOSTSTATEID:a.example.com$

where the plugin returns 2 if $HOSTSTATEID:a.example.com$ is 1 or 2,
and returns the result of "check_ping" if $HOSTSTATEID:a.example.com$
is 0. I think this should work according to the manual, does anybody
disagree?

Also does anybody have a better way of doing this?

				-- rouilj
John Rouillard
===========================================================================
My employers don't acknowledge my existence much less my opinions.


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