Is NSCA 2.9 stable?

[stefanlasiewski]

Is NSCA 2.9 considered "stable"?

It is not clear to me if NSCA 2.9 is production quality yet. Here are some reasons:

* I see several mentions on the web that 2.9 is not stable. See here. There are other similar comments out there, but I do not have time to find the links and post them here.
* http://nagios.org/download/addons links to http://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Addons/Passive-Checks/NSCA--2D-Nagios-Service-Check-Acceptor/details, which is an official page for NSCA. However, that page only has a download link to NSCA 2.7.2, not 2.9.
* According to sourceforge, NCSA 2.7 still has many more downloads then NSCA 2.9: http://sourceforge.net/projects/nagios/files/nsca-2.x/
* Fedora/RedHat still have NSCA 2.9.1 in their testing repo, not the stable repo: http://pkgs.org/centos-5-rhel-5/epel-te ... 6.rpm.html

-= Stefan

[jsmurphy]

To the best of my knowledge 2.7 is still considered the latest stable release. I wouldn't worry about it too much but if you want to be 100% certain that you have a stable release then get 2.7.

[stefanlasiewski]

Thank you jsmurphy.

I am asking this question because I use FreeBSD, and FreeBSD Ports only provides nsca 2.9 (See [1] and [2]). I am wondering if the maintainer for this port jumped the gun a bit and should provide a port for nsca 2.7. If I had a canonical statement from the developers stating that 2.9 is not-yet-production, that would help the FreeBSD community.

[1] http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/p ... mgmt/nsca/
[2] http://www.freshports.org/net-mgmt/nsca/

[jsmurphy]

ah I see, that could be a bit of an issue! Unfortunately I can't say with any level of certainty but hopefully some one else around here can.

[stefanlasiewski]

And, to help other folks coming in from Search Engines:

It appears that 2.9 clients cannot speak to existing 2.7 servers. This was an intentional design decision.

Also see the discussion on nagios-devel at http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.network ... devel/8267

[nagiosinc]

2.9.1 is the latest release and it should be stable; at least I'm not aware of any issues. Do not use 2.9. 2.7 is more than 5-1/2 years old. If you want to use 2.7 use 2.7.2 The major improvement in 2.9.x is the amount of performance data that can be sent. It was too small in versions prior to 2.9 to accommodate the amount of performance data return by some plugins. This is what the maintainer of NSCA told me.