[Nagiosplug-devel] check_ntp plugin issues

[Andreas Ericsson]

sean finney wrote:
> hi bill, 
> 
> check_ntp has been one of the thorns in my side for quite a while.  i
> think that trying to parse the output of ntpq is an inherently broken
> concept to begin with.  it seems every time we change one of the parsing
> pcre's to accomodate for one problem, we break something else.
> 
> i really feel that we should ditch the current version of check_ntp
> entirely, and that we should instead use something like Net::NTP, or
> preferably borrow/adapt/write some c code of our own to perform the check.
> 
> the former option would be really, really easy to do from a quick look
> at Net::NTP's documentation, though it would require installations
> to have it installed as a dependency.
> 

yuck... Perhaps the code from the module can be re-used instead? NTP 
being a binary protocol I doubt it's implemented as perl.


> not knowing enough about the protocol i can't make any claims on how
> difficult the latter option would be, though as i said it seems to be
> the Right Way imho, and would not put any additional requirements on a
> installation.


For public, unencrypted NTPv3 servers it's not terribly difficult. For 
servers with encrypted transfers it's definitely harder (I think 75% of 
the code in the current ISC ntpd handles the auto-key dancing).

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson at op5.se
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