NCPA Community_string -- what are the limitations?

[DBAFOX]

Hi ,

As the world is security consious - we are wondering what the limitations are on the community_string token with the ncpa agent & nagios xi
Now I have looked through the documentation , but we see nothing listed
some are obvious, such as it can contain alpha upper/lower and numeric .

My office would like to know things like:

• max length characters (64? 256? 1024?)

• special characters: appears you can use them, but are there any special characters we should avoid in the community_string ?
  as an example -- some software don't like the use of @ or & in their passwords

Our Nagios XI version: 2024R1.4.1 (Running on RHEL 9.5)

Our NCPA: 3.1.3 on most (we will need a few older agents for older OS
we support RHEL 7 thru current and Windows server 2008 thru current)

Thanks,
DBAFox

[bbahn]

Hello @DBAFOX,

There is no limit on the token length. I believe python's configparser is only limited by your system memory when it comes to the length of a field.
As for special characters, I resolved some issues with special characters around half a year ago and the @ and & type characters work properly now. I haven't tried ascii characters or other odd character symbols, but the standard characters you can type on a keyboard should all work.