In my case, a backup job might take down a MySQL database for anywhere from 1 minute to 1 hour, depending on the size of the database. Because the time needed to perform the backup is flexible and the time when the backup might occur is not always known, I cannot simply set the affected services to only notify in a timeperiod that excludes certain hours of the days. This is just an example of why I need to allow scripts and applications not on the nagios host(s) to be able to use the external command pipe. Currently I have a very simple API over https that uses the same auth mechanism as the Nagios frontend, and PHP classes that I can use in my client side scripts to manipulate this API. I am able to query Nagios about object data and status data, as well as submit commands to the nagios.cmd pipe. In order for the external command functionality to work the way I intend, I need to obtain a response from nagios so my server can respond back to the client with the results of processing the external command. I am really hoping there is an easy way to do this, as replacing the nagios.cmd file with something besides a FIFO pipe requires modification to the nagios source and is something I was trying to avoid. Thanks for the response. I hope this makes sense. -Scott <div> On 1/23/08, Andreas Ericsson <<a href="mailto:ae@op5.se">ae@op5.se</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Scott Sanders wrote: > Hi, > > I am working on implementing some functionality that will allow me to safely > expose nagios.cmd to external hosts. In my environment there are maintenance > tasks that run periodically which disrupt certain services, causing nagios > to start generating alerts. Needless to say, I am tired of having my cell > phone go crazy when this happens. In that case, why not ask "How do I keep my cellphone from waking me up?"? Instead, you've thought up a solution to your problem, which generates other problems, and now you want help solving those other problems. Assuming you know when these disruptive tasks are run, you should simply create a notification_period that doesn't include the sensitive hours and use that notification_period for the services being disrupted. There are other solutions too, but this one is normally the recommended, so I suggest you try that out first. -- Andreas Ericsson <a href="mailto:andreas.ericsson@op5.se">andreas.ericsson@op5.se</a> OP5 AB <a href="http://www.op5.se">www.op5.se</a> Tel: +46 8-230225 Fax: +46 8-230231 </blockquote> </div>