syntax for check_http

[emartine]

We have a website that continues to become unavailable although the service is running fine so I am being asked to authenticate to the site to ensure its availability.
My thoughts on this are to authentication to website and find a string on the page.

would check_http be able to do this?
Any insight on the proper syntax for it?

To make this worse the username has a / in it and the password has ? and ! in it.

[tmcdonald]

How is the authentication handled? If it is using anything other than HTTP basic auth you will need to use something like Selenium or WebInject to simulate a login:

https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... ios-XI.pdf
https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... ios-XI.pdf (page 5)

Edit: Well, that's not entirely true. If you can pass login credentials or a token as part of the URL you can likely check a page that requires logging in with check_http alone, but this is not good security practice (nor incredibly common).

[mcapra]

Any insight on the proper syntax for it?

From the help menu:

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 -s, --string=STRING
    String to expect in the content

In practice:

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[root@localhost libexec]# ./check_http -H www.example.com -s "established"
HTTP OK: HTTP/1.1 200 OK - 1622 bytes in 0.367 second response time |time=0.366765s;;;0.000000 size=1622B;;;0

To make this worse the username has a / in it and the password has ? and ! in it.

If it's basic auth:

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 -a, --authorization=AUTH_PAIR
    Username:password on sites with basic authentication

Otherwise if the credentials are expected over POST, you could try passing them using the -P flag:

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 -P, --post=STRING
    URL encoded http POST data

The special characters are going to be particularly tricky. Here's how, in the Website URL wizard, I escaped the string fancy/text?stuff! --- fancy/text"?"stuff\!

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[root@localhost libexec]# ./check_http -H test.site.com -s fancy/text"?"stuff\!
HTTP OK: HTTP/1.1 200 OK - 3604 bytes in 0.096 second response time |time=0.095762s;;;0.000000 size=3604B;;;0

[emartine]

That is why the account I am using is a restricted account and the web pages have nothing that can be modified anyway. It will only have access to a specific page and nothing more.
check_http -s "my (their) string im looking for (1.0)" -f ok -I <SERVERIP> -u "URL" -S -p 443 -a "some/account:!some.?password"

can you help witht he special character syntax?

[mcapra]

Here's what worked for me:
username: test/user
password: !some.?password

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[root@localhost libexec]# ./check_http -H test.site.com -a test/user:\!some."?"password
HTTP OK: HTTP/1.1 200 OK - 2171 bytes in 0.046 second response time |time=0.045749s;;;0.000000 size=2171B;;;0

And, for posterity, as a service definition in the GUI:

[emartine]

My check is being redirected to the login page and doesn't actually authenticate. I used the -v option to show syntax. Any idea why the -a isn't working?

[mcapra]

Are you absolutely certain that basic authentication is what's used to authenticate? If the -a flag fails, check_http usually returns a 401. There isn't usually a "login page" to redirect to, but if this is the case we might need to revise the command.

2016_07_28_15_13_29_test.site.png

Can you also show us the -v output (omitting sensitive information)?

[emartine]

This is probably form based.

I am getting a STATUS: HTTP/1.1 302 Found
**** HEADER ****
<<URL and server app information>>
**** CONTENT ****
<<OBJECT MOVED>> <<LOGIN>>

[mcapra]

Ah, if it's form based I can't provide much insight other than to use the aforementioned -P flag and change your url path to the form's onsubmit or action value. That's getting pretty technical though. I was able to do that with an incredibly simple form, but not all forms are created equal. If the form has any sort of back-end handling, just passing raw POST data will likely fail.

As @tmcdonald mentioned, Selenium or WebInject are more consistent/appropriate options for this. Refer to his post for handy documents.

[emartine]

Seems like webinject would be the better candidate. Do you have a quick FAQ for setting this up?