Nagios Support Forum

OS: Centos 6.2
Nagios XI 2012R1.0

When I try adding a "!" character to the args field, it doesn't save the character even when I put quotes around it. Is there a workaround for this?

I believe you need to escape this with a \

I tried that. In this version of Nagios XI it removes the character and sometimes even puts the ARGS on the next line.

The main problem is when you try adding in a ! or if you have that as a password, for example, in the WMI wizard. I can't get this to work with any number of combinations I've tried.

One temporary solution is to put the special characters in the "command" instead of in the arguments. I got around it, but would really like to get this bug fixed up.

Yeah, the other possibility would be to put the password in the resource.cfg, but if you've got a LOT of passwords to store, that probably won't work terribly well. That'll be a bit of a tricky bug since the ! also acts as the argument separator in the service command, but we'll definitely get it added to the list.

This is actually a bigger problem than I first thought. The "!" has problems saving anywhere as well. I have another client that uses that symbol in their snmp community string and it errors out as well. The resource.cfg file is ok for one or two items, but is a real problem when you have over 100. In this case there are about 1000 different servers. What would you suggest here? Is there a fix for this I can apply or upgrade to?

niebais wrote: Is there a fix for this I can apply or upgrade to?

There is not. The char "!" is a meta character for nagios arguments. resources.cfg is the *only* option if you use this character. It is generally best practice to avoid using $ ! # ^ | ; in your objects/settings/names/passwords as these are considered meta characters by *many* programs.

Yeah I realize that the "!" shouldn't be used, however, 99% of the customers don't think that way and use it thinking it should be ok. It's hard to change large companies password's when you are there as well.

niebais wrote:Yeah I realize that the "!" shouldn't be used, however, 99% of the customers don't think that way and use it thinking it should be ok.

Truth. I wish we had a work around, but this is hard-coded into core. It is generally good practice to include non-alpha-numerics in passwords, but there are some chars that I wish were flat out restricted for names/passwords/etc on all platforms.