[Nagiosplug-devel] Working on testcases

[Andreas Ericsson]

Garrett Honeycutt wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-11-04 at 22:20 +0000, Ton Voon wrote:
> 
>>On 4 Nov 2005, at 18:50, John P. Rouillard wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Ton Voon writes:
>>>
>>>
>>>>On 4 Nov 2005, at 17:58, John P. Rouillard wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>How about a flag to set the exit status in case of a failed lookup?
>>>>
>>>>What do you mean?
>>>
>>>--dns-failure-status = CRITICAL
>>>--dns-faulre-status = UNKNOWN
>>>
>>>Then if a dns failure occurs, the user can set what they want the
>>>exit status of the command to be.
>>
>>I see what you mean now. However, using this technique would mean  
>>that every plugin using hostname lookups would have to support this  
>>flag and I'm not sure that is a good idea.
>>
>>And then what if you get a different kind of failure? A malloc call  
>>failure? A system call with unexpected results? A different flag for  
>>each?
> 
> 
> It could be a compile time option handled by the configure script. This
> gives those who want to change it the ability.
> 


No, no, no, no, no. Compiled binaries are supposed to behave identically 
on all systems they come across. So what happens if Debian chooses the 
non-default strategy? List-noise goes up, up, up.

> 
>>I'm of the Keep It Simple philosophy so I think we need to decide  
>>whether "unexpected failures" should be UNKNOWN or CRITICAL.  
>>Unfortunately, I think your suggestion will take us to some  
>>complicated exceptions handling.
> 
> 
> "my thought is that for most plugins (except the dns-related ones),
> UNKNOWN seems a proper state.  chances are there's something
> monitoring DNS that will issue a CRITICAL anyway.  however, i don't
> feel to comitted to this opinion and would be interested to hear
> the counter-argument." -sean
> 
> I would rather get false positives than miss something because the
> status was UNKNOWN as opposed to CRTICAL.
> 
> 

I've lobbied before to get a "transport/network" error status in Nagios 
so that UNKNOWN can be used for user-error only.

It could certainly be used for this case.

OTOH, if a dns lookup fails, the service *is* actually UNKNOWN, since 
the plugin can't check it.

> 
>>Anyway, what's the default setting? :)
>>
>>Ton
>>
>>
>>http://www.altinity.com
>>T: +44 (0)870 787 9243
>>F: +44 (0)845 280 1725
>>Skype: tonvoon
>>
>>
>>
>>
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-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231