Nagios Support Forum

Mods, feel free to remove this if it comes off too ranty.

The Idea: A password support standard for Nagios and all plugins.

The Why: In most applications, complex passwords have been supported for a long time so there's no reason Nagios should be lacking this. Nagios is supposed to be an enterprise level monitoring system...but most enterprise password conventions include special characters. It should be made a point to hold Nagios itself as well as official and third party plugins up to this same enterprise standard. Also in terms of debugging, its ridiculous that a password would cause an issue in anything. Proper variable sanitization should be a standard.

The community of plugins is fairly broad on this one, but maybe you could highlight specifically where this is causing the most issues. We can certainly improve this on plugins, wizards, and interface aspects that we have a hand on. Based on the all caps it is clear this has been a frustration. Can you point out a few specifics and we'll see what we can do?

I'm cool with rants as long as we can make something constructive out of them, and I definitely feel that's the case here ; )

The primary issue is a lack of enterprise grade password support in Nagios. Most recently with the EMC plugin, I couldn't use a password with a "#" symbol in it. The client then had to change the password which violated their password conventions. To me, this isn't a big deal but it is to them as they're a rather large hospital organization in which security is paramount. Another instance of this would be with the WMI monitoring I've been slaving away on. In order to allow easy access to all servers, the client created a domain account that's part of the admin users...god-like powers secured by a poor password because the WMI plugin doesn't support a strong password.

I'm unsure if this has any implication in the regular Nagios plugins but on more than one occasion, special characters in the password have been the first check point in the trouble shooting process.