Why root access on icmp & dhcp plugins

[sgiworks]

Hello Team,

Please find attached screen shot from the error triggered on permission for check_icmp & check_dhcp plugins. Can you please let us know why do these two plugins need root access? I believe its for check the host alive status, but that can be done by a ping command, right?

Path:
/usr/local/nagios/libexec/check_icmp
/usr/local/nagios/libexec/check_dhcp

Regards,
Swapnil

[avandemore]

Can you please let us know why do these two plugins need root access?

The underlying OS internals require this. Basically anything capable of opening a raw socket needs root, unless it's like the setuid ping.

I believe its for check the host alive status, but that can be done by a ping command, right?

That depends on how you define host alive status. One or more metrics can be used to achieve this. A simple ICMP check may be good enough for a lot of use cases.

[bwallace]

You can refer to this doc on changing the host alive metric(s)
https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... 1456514247

Curious about your permissions on those files, could you post the output of:

Code: Select all

ll /usr/local/nagios/libexec/check_icmp
ll /usr/local/nagios/libexec/check_dhcp