Monitor Non-Standard Ports in Nagios
Posted in How To on August 25th, 2010 by skylercall – Be the first to commentI have been playing with Nagios over the last couple days. Aside from the steep learning curve I am quite happy with it. The largest frustration I encountered, however, is that no where in their official documentation does it say anything about monitoring services that are on non-standard ports. After searching for a solution I finally came across a few people talking about defining a custom command like this:
define command{
command_name check_customport
command_line /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_tcp -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -p [PORT]
}
Using this method required extra definitions in my configuration files and even then my services were reported as working when in fact they were not (although, I may have just figured out why).
There is a much simpler way! I was sure there must be a native command for altering which port Nagios checks. Finally, I found it buried in their wiki:
define service{
use generic-service
host_name remotehost
service_description HTTP
check_command check_http!-p [PORT]
}
It is as simple as appending “!-p [Your Custom Port Goes Here]” to the check_command! My Nagios definitions just got a lot simpler.
With Windows XP, throughout the day, I would accumulate many instances of Notepad; each with different notes taken from phone calls, assignments given to me by others in the office, or just little tasks that I did not want to forget. Having so many instances of Notepad open all at once would clutter up the taskbar and also the Alt+Tab window making it more confusing and time-consuming to navigate from one window to another. When it came time to restart my computer for whatever reason I first had to go through all the Notepad instances and save them to my desktop. If my computer ever shutdown unexpectedly due to a crash or power-loss I lost all my unsaved notes from that day.
Now with Windows 7 I can see the full date without moving my mouse. If I want to browse the calendar I click it an up pops a non-destructive, read-only calendar! If I absolutely want to change my system date (which I’ve never wanted to do before but I suppose is necessary for computers that don’t have access to the internet for an NTP server) I first have to click ‘Change date and time settings…’.
This one is a bit difficult for me to explain. When I first started navigating in Windows Explorer I panicked when I couldn’t find the Up button to jump to the parent folder (Yes, I know. There is a Back button but back isn’t always up!) but then I found something better. There is an ant trail at the top where you can click on any parent folder. Even better is that each parent folder has an arrow next to it that when clicked drops down to give you access to any of its sub folders. This makes moving around much quicker.
Keeping my hard drives fragment-free, optimized for speed and efficiency, is now easier with Windows 7. Back in Windows XP I had to setup a custom Scheduled Task to run Disk Defragmenter on a schedule. Now, setting up the same schedule is easily done using the native Configure Schedule tool within Disk Defragmenter. Click ‘Configure Schedule’, set the frequency, the time of day, and you are done!
I am so excited about Google’s new