check_http confusion / problem

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Thanks to various list members for pointing me at various bits of
documentation that I hadn't been able to find, which explain that commands
can in fact take arguments, and that those and other useful things are
called "macros".  (I've been using macros since 1401 Autocoder, and mostly
think of them as compile time code-generating tools.)

So, what's with the check_http plugin?  The parameters it accepts don't
match the parameters its help says it accepts.  But beyond that, the -e
switch doesn't seem to do what it says it should.

I'm not getting invalid results because I'm running from the command line,
am I?  This seems much the easiest way to test things, and it rather
sounds like this is an intended use.  But thought I'd ask just to be sure.

In this case, the expected result of the test is a 400 Bad Request error
(because I'm hitting a web services port and requesting root; this test is
intended to do a minimal check and see that the service director is up,
but not test the individual services yet).  So the "400 Bad Request"
response is correct and valid.

Now, the -e switch seems to be intended to check just this status line,
and to nicely short-circuit later processing, and seems in all ways
optimized for exactly what I'm doing.  Except for the minor fact that it
doesn't seem to work.  See below, run in verbose mode.  I've tried a bunch
of variants on the value I pass to -e, including the whole line given, and
they all give the same result, an exit code of 2 and the "invalid HTTP
response code" message.   So what's up?  And is there more documentation
on the plugins hidden somewhere, particularly this one?

[ddb at prcapp00 dev]$ /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_http
--IP-address=192.168.5.3 -p 8075 --no-body -f critical -v -v -v -e="Bad
Request"
GET / HTTP/1.0
User-Agent: check_http/1.99 (nagios-plugins 1.4.6)


http://192.168.5.3:8075/ is 168 characters
STATUS: HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
**** HEADER ****
Content-Type: text/html
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2009 18:33:44 GMT
Connection: close
Content-Length: 39
**** CONTENT ****
  [[ skipped ]]
Invalid HTTP response received from host on port 8075
[ddb at prcapp00 dev]$ echo $?
2



-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info


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