Standard Nagios Plugins 1.4.9 and IPv6 problem?

[Hugo van der Kooij]

On Thu, 20 Sep 2007, Andreas Ericsson wrote:

> Hugo van der Kooij wrote:
>> On Wed, 19 Sep 2007, Frost, Mark {PBG} wrote:
>>
>>> Hello.  We've been noticing that our Nagios host (Red Hat ES 3 release
>>> 3) has been sending out quite a lot of IPv6 DNS requests (I guess those
>>> are "AAAA" record requests on port 53).  As our box is not configured to
>>> do IPv6, this was a puzzlement.  At first I assumed it was some weird
>>> resolver library configuration issue, but we couldn't find anything.
>>>
>>> We started running funky queries (ones we new Nagios wouldn't normally
>>> run) and looking for them via tcpdump on port 53.  We found that if we
>>> ran pretty much any off the nagios-plugins package, it would generate
>>> these IPv6 packets.  I did not enable IPv6 when I built the package.  I
>>> tried rebuilding everything explicitly saying "--without-ipv6".  It made
>>> no difference.
>>
>> I guess you have hosts defined by name and not by IP address.
>>
>> So the normal thing to do is find both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses of the host
>> and then decide how to contact the host.
>>
>> So unless you have an operational problem I would ignore it as business as
>> usual.
>>
>
> It's still a fairly nasty bug though. Imo, Ipv6 is not widely used enough to
> warrant including code for it in the plugins unless explicitly asked to when
> compiling them. For a large installation, doing 4-6 IPv6 dns queries (which
> fail) will take a lot of time and consume a lot of resources.
>
> AFAIK, there are only very few networks in the entire world that fully support
> IPv6. If nothing else, the plugins should probably try IPv4 first and just
> ignore trying to query with IPv6 if IPv4 works.

I think that a pluging will just follow the host definition. I doubt there 
is anything you can change in the plugins to ignore IPv6 resolving if you 
use a hostname. It is something that should be part of your resolver 
library behaviour. So it should be configured there.

Hugo.

-- 
 	hvdkooij at vanderkooij.org	http://hugo.vanderkooij.org/
 	    This message is using 100% recycled electrons.

 	Some men see computers as they are and say "Windows"
 	I use computers with Linux and say "Why Windows?"
 	(Thanks JFK, for this quote of George Bernard Shaw.)

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