[Nagiosplug-devel] Integrating Nagios::Plugin into the distribution

[Olivier Raginel]

On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 03:21:35PM +0200, Matthias Eble wrote:
> Today, I set up N::P for testing purposes. And to me it was really 
> annoying to resolve the dependencies (so my question was outdated a bit 
> ) by hand since I cannot configure cpan to access the internet due to 
> security policy.

Hum, I agree, but disagree too.
Yes, having to resolve dependencies by hand is harsh, but you'll have to 
do so for every CPAN module. Here, for N::P, when I tried it, I had to 
add:
Test-Simple-0.67.tar.gz
Params-Validate-0.88.tar.gz
Class-Accessor-0.30.tar.gz

So that's 3 packages to download manually. Then you have several ways. 
One is to install them on all your hosts (thus do something like:
for host in YOUR HOST LIST;do
  for package in *.tar.gz;do
    scp $package $host:
    ssh $host "tar zxf $package && cd ${package%.tar.gz} && perl \
         Makefile.PL && make make test && && su -c 'make install'"
  done
done

Or, if you want to have them only for Nagios, so install locally, you 
could simply copy the installed version (of course, this means all your 
hosts are of the same flavor of Unix, and some similar versions of perl. 
And in fact, looking at the dependencies, they're only .pm, so nothing 
fancy like C-modules, so they might work anywhere.

Yes, I agree it's a bit of a pain, but honestly, it's not that hard to 
do.
Oh and for the FindBin... Yes, it seems nice, but usually (correct me if 
I'm wrong), @INC contains . as the last entry, so launching your modules 
from the proper directory solves your PATH resolution.
For example, I've installed all N::P and dependencies inside 
~/Nagios-Plugin-0.15/lib:
drwxr-xr-x  3 nagios nagios 4096 2007-03-13 18:22 Class
drwxr-xr-x  3 nagios nagios 4096 2007-03-13 18:22 Nagios
drwxr-xr-x  2 nagios nagios 4096 2007-03-13 18:23 Params
drwxr-xr-x  5 nagios nagios 4096 2007-03-13 18:23 Test

If I launch my plugins from there, doing something like 
~/check_tomcat.pl, the perl script finds all my modules.
Again, not sure it's the default behavior for perl. According to the 
documentation I found, "." is not appended if using taint mode:
http://perldoc.perl.org/perlvar.html#@INC

> Without bundling I need to get either all the packages for every OS I'm 
> running (if they even exist) or have to do the triathlon (perl 
> Makefile.pl,make,make install) in addition to usual plugin compiling.
> So if you ask me, bundling is a must and to allow not bundled versions 
> would be perfect.

Do you re-compile your plugins on all your hosts?
If yes, for me, you ought to have to recompile all dependencies.
Providing a lazy way to do it doesn't seem good to me.
For now, dependencies are small and easy, but what will happen the day 
we'll want to add more complex modules, like ones using bites of C-code?

I think Gavin and Patrick already expressed all I think on this topic, 
and as an admin having to install it on several machines too, I do think 
it's easier and more flexible to install the packages system-wide OR 
MANUALLY within the nagios plugin directory.
What I do to replicate plugins is a simple rsync (in fact, tar cf - .| 
ssh tar xf -). 
Thus I can easily add anything I like within, and it will be replicated.

Just my 2 cts,

Kind regards,

-- 
Olivier 'Babar' Raginel.