NSFAQ (Not So Frequently Asked Questions)

Let's be honest. Nagios has lots of good things. But it also have bad ones: it stores data in non-indexed text files, executes a compiled CGI, configuration files are unconfortable when adding and removing new machines (mainly removing them)... and mainly: it's ugly. Maybe ugly is not the word... it's austere, simple, not attractive.

I don't give a damn (and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one), because it's a tool, and it does its work. I'm not here to enjoy watching it, but to warn me when things go wrong, and to explain me why are they going wrong. But in this world, the ones who take decisions and buy things, they frequently look at the appearance, sometimes beyond functionality. Then if you are trying to convince someone to use nagios, you'll have more chances if it was pretty.

Here is where nagios nuvola style comes, to give nagios another look, very different, and to make it nicer (in the full article you'll find two screenshots so you can compare). It's made by the same people that made nagiosql, and although it has a nagiosexchange page, the downloadable file there is corrupt (one css is bad, status.css, and it looks very different). I took it from this website, and you can download it here, too.

Installing it couldn't be easier. You just copy files inside "html" directory inside your nagios. In a debian, for instance, it's as easy as:

And that's it, you got your look-improved nagios!

We woudn't like our domain to expire, and having our domain bought by an ciberspeculator (also bad-known as "cibersquatters"), asking us 1.000$ for it, when it's actually worth 20 (I've lived that situation with a personal domain name of myself).

It's not a big deal, after all registrars always warn users in advance, giving you every chance for renewal (that's their interest). But... what if the email address you configured that day, is not active any more? What if the new boss secretary mistake it with spam, and ignore it (real case)? What if the company is so big that no one knows who is reading that email address?

To make sure we are up-to-date with our domains, I've created a nagios plugin, named "check_domain". It's simple (if you look at the code, you'll see there's more lines parsing parameters than doing things ), but it covers our needs, and warns you when the domain name is near to expire.

In the full article ("read more") you can see the code, and a downloadable file.

When you see a windows stopped server in your nagios console, sometimes you would like to add an event_handler who tries to start the service automatically.

With samba , it´s been a long term feature, some way to control services ( net stop or net start ), but I haven't found that this ever worked.

There's a useful tool: winexe . With this tool, you can, not only stop and start windows services, but execute any shell comand, even having a windows shell inside your linux box, as simply as: