Nagios User Crontab and pwd expiration issue

[griffithusg]

Hi Everyone.
I have been scratching my head a bit on a problem with my Nagios Server.

Server details
Rhel 5.8
Installed Version: 2012R1.4

I have two. One is our Main production server and that one is working fine. The other is our secondary server and it only monitors the primary monitoring server from offsite.

The secondary server was having all kinds of issues where it wasn't running any of the subsystem commands. I then discovered that the Nagios users' PWD had expired and this stopped cron from working.

After un-expiring the pwd cron started to fire up again and the sub-system started working. I then started seeing huge load on the system and notice that it was the /usr/bin/php -q /usr/local/nagiosxi/cron/perfdataproc.php processes running from cron.

Upon looking at the main production I noticed that the nagios user doesn't have anything in its crontab. Which one is correct? As the production one is running smoothly without huge amounts of load, i'm starting to think that the secondary system shouldn't have anything in its crontab.

*Update -
I have commented out the nagios user's crontab and load appears to be reducing. The Subsystem processes are also running so I am going to assume that these are executed outside of the cron daemon.


Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[scottwilkerson]

Actually, they load with cron from /etc/cron.d/nagiosxi

And it would be normal if the cron were failing, after fixing that there would be a huge load spike because of all of the backed up perfdata that would start flowing through the system again...

[griffithusg]

Right, that makes sense.
Stange that the upgrade scripts didn't pick up that the nagios user crontab was also there.

A suggestion I have is to check the status of the nagios user's password. If it's in any state other than OK nagiosXi should alert the admin via the web interface much like the status bar at the top.

Thanks

[lmiltchev]

Run the following command in terminal:

Code: Select all

chage -l nagios

Is this what you were looking for?