Mailing List Archive

On Sat, 2008-07-05 at 17:54 +0200, Sven Vermeulen wrote:
> Hi Matthew
>
> As I said on https://bugs.gentoo.org/131942 I'm going to focus my
> attention on a document about Nagios and Gentoo. I don't know if you
> or one of your colleagues is already working on Nagios documentation
> for Gentoo?
>
> My focus is not on Nagios itself - we don't need to document Nagios,
> they have documentation editors themselves. However, the document
> would focus on installing Nagios on the master server, installing the
> necessary plugins on the clients, configuring nrpe/check_ssh on Gentoo
> systems and integrating Gentoo-specific metrics.
>
> Can you tell me if you know someone already working on similar documentation?

If you need any technical assistance with this, let me know. I'm *very*
familiar with Nagios and integrating it with Gentoo.

--
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Games Developer

On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 7:03 PM, Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
> If you need any technical assistance with this, let me know. I'm *very*
> familiar with Nagios and integrating it with Gentoo.

Always. I'm not familiar with Nagios (only on lappy and lguest test
images) so any help is appreciated. I just committed my current draft
state (not much, but it shows the structure I'm hoping to go with as
well as the content I want to address in the guide).

What I definitely need is some input on monitoring other systems (the
NRPE plugin, with SSL, and check_ssh) with information about the
differences between the methods (I suppose NRPE is a somewhat active
approach whereas check_ssh is more a passive "pull" approach).

You're free to edit the guide, even with just some <pre> tags to help
me with the technical stuff :-)

Also, this is not only targeted at Chris.

Wkr,
Sven Vermeulen
--
gentoo-doc@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

On Mon, 2008-07-07 at 20:08 +0200, Sven Vermeulen wrote:
> Always. I'm not familiar with Nagios (only on lappy and lguest test
> images) so any help is appreciated. I just committed my current draft
> state (not much, but it shows the structure I'm hoping to go with as
> well as the content I want to address in the guide).

Ahh. I use Nagios 2 and Nagios 3 to monitor Gentoo, Red Hat, NetApp
Filers, Solaris, Cisco switches/routers/firewalls, power distribution
units, etc.

> What I definitely need is some input on monitoring other systems (the
> NRPE plugin, with SSL, and check_ssh) with information about the
> differences between the methods (I suppose NRPE is a somewhat active
> approach whereas check_ssh is more a passive "pull" approach).

Well, those aren't the only options. In fact, I recommend using
*neither* of them, unless your hosts are on a remote network.

> You're free to edit the guide, even with just some <pre> tags to help
> me with the technical stuff :-)

Sure. I'll send my edits here first, though.

--
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Games Developer

Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-07-07 at 20:08 +0200, Sven Vermeulen wrote:
>> Always. I'm not familiar with Nagios (only on lappy and lguest test
>> images) so any help is appreciated. I just committed my current draft
>> state (not much, but it shows the structure I'm hoping to go with as
>> well as the content I want to address in the guide).
>
> Ahh. I use Nagios 2 and Nagios 3 to monitor Gentoo, Red Hat, NetApp
> Filers, Solaris, Cisco switches/routers/firewalls, power distribution
> units, etc.
>
>> What I definitely need is some input on monitoring other systems (the
>> NRPE plugin, with SSL, and check_ssh) with information about the
>> differences between the methods (I suppose NRPE is a somewhat active
>> approach whereas check_ssh is more a passive "pull" approach).
>
> Well, those aren't the only options. In fact, I recommend using
> *neither* of them, unless your hosts are on a remote network.
>
>> You're free to edit the guide, even with just some <pre> tags to help
>> me with the technical stuff :-)
>
> Sure. I'll send my edits here first, though.
>
Once these early drafts are in place I'll stick the interns on them for editing, etc.
I'm certainly looking forward to this bit o' doc!
Thanks,
Matt

--
Matthew W. Summers

Chief Executive Officer & Systems Engineer
Liquidus Tech, LLC
218 1/2 Park Central West
Springfield, MO 65806
(417) 894-2607
matthew.summers@liquidustech.com
www.liquidustech.com
--
gentoo-doc@lists.gentoo.org mailing list

On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 5:13 PM, Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> What I definitely need is some input on monitoring other systems (the
>> NRPE plugin, with SSL, and check_ssh) with information about the
>> differences between the methods (I suppose NRPE is a somewhat active
>> approach whereas check_ssh is more a passive "pull" approach).
>
> Well, those aren't the only options. In fact, I recommend using
> *neither* of them, unless your hosts are on a remote network.

Is it possible to monitor multiple systems (with Nagios) without
NRPE/ssh but still on the same /nagios site? Or do you log on to every
single system to obtain the monitoring overview of all services on
that system?

Wkr,
Sven Vermeulen

Sven Vermeulen wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 5:13 PM, Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >> What I definitely need is some input on monitoring other systems (the
> >> NRPE plugin, with SSL, and check_ssh) with information about the
> >> differences between the methods (I suppose NRPE is a somewhat active
> >> approach whereas check_ssh is more a passive "pull" approach).
> >
> > Well, those aren't the only options. In fact, I recommend using
> > *neither* of them, unless your hosts are on a remote network.
>
> Is it possible to monitor multiple systems (with Nagios) without
> NRPE/ssh but still on the same /nagios site? Or do you log on to every
> single system to obtain the monitoring overview of all services on
> that system?

Guess Chris was referring to monitor boxes on a local network using SNMP
(for which we have net-analyzer/nagios-plugins-snmp in addition to the
standard snmp checks from the nagios-plugins package).

Tobias
--
Gentoo Linux - Die Metadistribution
http://www.mitp.de/1769

On Sat, 2008-07-26 at 22:02 +0200, Sven Vermeulen wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 5:13 PM, Chris Gianelloni <wolf31o2@gentoo.org> wrote:
> >> What I definitely need is some input on monitoring other systems (the
> >> NRPE plugin, with SSL, and check_ssh) with information about the
> >> differences between the methods (I suppose NRPE is a somewhat active
> >> approach whereas check_ssh is more a passive "pull" approach).
> >
> > Well, those aren't the only options. In fact, I recommend using
> > *neither* of them, unless your hosts are on a remote network.
>
> Is it possible to monitor multiple systems (with Nagios) without
> NRPE/ssh but still on the same /nagios site? Or do you log on to every
> single system to obtain the monitoring overview of all services on
> that system?

Umm... You can monitor any number of hosts. I'm monitoring over 100
systems from a single Nagios instance, and I do not use NRPE or SSH for
*any* of my monitoring. I use SNMP.

--
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Games Developer

On Sat, Jul 5, 2008 at 5:54 PM, Sven Vermeulen <swift@gentoo.org> wrote:
> My focus is not on Nagios itself - we don't need to document Nagios,
> they have documentation editors themselves. However, the document
> would focus on installing Nagios on the master server, installing the
> necessary plugins on the clients, configuring nrpe/check_ssh on Gentoo
> systems and integrating Gentoo-specific metrics.

Who knew integrating Gentoo specific metrics was this easy - just
download some scripts and integrate them ;-)

Well, I've somewhat finished what I could do for the Nagios guide.
Although it does talk about remote system integration (using
check_nrpe and a quick pointer on passwordless SSH) it definitely
needs some more lovin' on this behalf.

At this moment, I'm waiting for Nagios 3 to become stable on Gentoo so
that I can rerun the guide over again on a clean install (to make sure
no errors are in it) but please, everybody with some experience with
Nagios and some free time, take a look at the document
(http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/nagios-guide.xml) and add in some
paragraphs on topics you want to see added as well.

Dertobi wanted to see a chapter on extending the installation - if you
have a few pointers I don't mind taking a stab at this as well.

Wkr,
Sven Vermeulen

On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 21:02 +0200, Sven Vermeulen wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 5, 2008 at 5:54 PM, Sven Vermeulen <swift@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > My focus is not on Nagios itself - we don't need to document Nagios,
> > they have documentation editors themselves. However, the document
> > would focus on installing Nagios on the master server, installing the
> > necessary plugins on the clients, configuring nrpe/check_ssh on Gentoo
> > systems and integrating Gentoo-specific metrics.
>
> Who knew integrating Gentoo specific metrics was this easy - just
> download some scripts and integrate them ;-)
>
> Well, I've somewhat finished what I could do for the Nagios guide.
> Although it does talk about remote system integration (using
> check_nrpe and a quick pointer on passwordless SSH) it definitely
> needs some more lovin' on this behalf.
>
> At this moment, I'm waiting for Nagios 3 to become stable on Gentoo so
> that I can rerun the guide over again on a clean install (to make sure
> no errors are in it) but please, everybody with some experience with
> Nagios and some free time, take a look at the document
> (http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/nagios-guide.xml) and add in some
> paragraphs on topics you want to see added as well.

I was planning on giving you some CVS diffs. ;]

> Dertobi wanted to see a chapter on extending the installation - if you
> have a few pointers I don't mind taking a stab at this as well.

Well, Tobias mentioned the nagios-plugins-snmp package in the tree.
I've got something like 20 or 30 more Nagios-related packages in my
company's overlay. I didn't add them to the tree because I didn't want
to maintain them, knowing that I was close to retirement.

I *do* plan on making the packages available via an overlay. Hopefully,
they'll be picked up by someone from the netmon team and added to the
tree.

I guess that I should also mention that I have several modifications to
Nagios' ebuilds, along with Cacti (and several other SNMP management
packages) which I will also be making available. I've been working on
an extension to the HOST-RESOURCES MIB to get package information and
export it via SNMP, much like is done on RPM-based distributions, but
it's taking a bit longer than I had originally anticipated. That's
honestly the only "Gentoo-specific" items that I can recall which
someone would want.

--
Chris Gianelloni
Ex-Developer

Chris Gianelloni wrote:
> > At this moment, I'm waiting for Nagios 3 to become stable on Gentoo so
> > that I can rerun the guide over again on a clean install (to make sure
> > no errors are in it) but please, everybody with some experience with
> > Nagios and some free time, take a look at the document
> > (http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/nagios-guide.xml) and add in some
> > paragraphs on topics you want to see added as well.

I'm going to file a stable request for our architectures teams somewhen
next week probably. I'll take a look at that guide and also reference it
in the postinstall-note :)

> I was planning on giving you some CVS diffs. ;]

dito ;)

> > Dertobi wanted to see a chapter on extending the installation - if you
> > have a few pointers I don't mind taking a stab at this as well.

pointers are pnp4nagios and nagvis - integrating pnp4nagios is quite
simple, i'll send in a diff this weekend. As for nagvis i'm working on
an ebuild right now, also integration this is a bit more complicated,
that's something for an 1.1 version of this guide.

> Well, Tobias mentioned the nagios-plugins-snmp package in the tree.
> I've got something like 20 or 30 more Nagios-related packages in my
> company's overlay. I didn't add them to the tree because I didn't want
> to maintain them, knowing that I was close to retirement.
>
> I *do* plan on making the packages available via an overlay. Hopefully,
> they'll be picked up by someone from the netmon team and added to the
> tree.

Point me to an overlay and i'll take a look at it. It's my motivation to
make the Nagios integration into Gentoo as best as possible. With
integrating lots of useful plugins we make a huge difference to other
distributions which in most cases only include the nagios-plugins
package and that's it.

> I guess that I should also mention that I have several modifications to
> Nagios' ebuilds, along with Cacti (and several other SNMP management
> packages) which I will also be making available. I've been working on
> an extension to the HOST-RESOURCES MIB to get package information and
> export it via SNMP, much like is done on RPM-based distributions, but
> it's taking a bit longer than I had originally anticipated. That's
> honestly the only "Gentoo-specific" items that I can recall which
> someone would want.

Interested in that ;)

Tobias