Thanks to various list members for pointing me at various bits of documentation that I hadn't been able to find, which explain that commands can in fact take arguments, and that those and other useful things are called "macros". (I've been using macros since 1401 Autocoder, and mostly think of them as compile time code-generating tools.)
So, what's with the check_http plugin? The parameters it accepts don't match the parameters its help says it accepts. But beyond that, the -e switch doesn't seem to do what it says it should. I'm not getting invalid results because I'm running from the command line, am I? This seems much the easiest way to test things, and it rather sounds like this is an intended use. But thought I'd ask just to be sure. In this case, the expected result of the test is a 400 Bad Request error (because I'm hitting a web services port and requesting root; this test is intended to do a minimal check and see that the service director is up, but not test the individual services yet). So the "400 Bad Request" response is correct and valid. Now, the -e switch seems to be intended to check just this status line, and to nicely short-circuit later processing, and seems in all ways optimized for exactly what I'm doing. Except for the minor fact that it doesn't seem to work. See below, run in verbose mode. I've tried a bunch of variants on the value I pass to -e, including the whole line given, and they all give the same result, an exit code of 2 and the "invalid HTTP response code" message. So what's up? And is there more documentation on the plugins hidden somewhere, particularly this one? [...@prcapp00 dev]$ /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_http --IP-address=192.168.5.3 -p 8075 --no-body -f critical -v -v -v -e="Bad Request" GET / HTTP/1.0 User-Agent: check_http/1.99 (nagios-plugins 1.4.6) http://192.168.5.3:8075/ is 168 characters STATUS: HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request **** HEADER **** Content-Type: text/html Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2009 18:33:44 GMT Connection: close Content-Length: 39 **** CONTENT **** [[ skipped ]] Invalid HTTP response received from host on port 8075 [...@prcapp00 dev]$ echo $? 2 -- David Dyer-Bennet, d...@dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ Nagios-users mailing list Nagios-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nagios-users ::: Please include Nagios version, plugin version (-v) and OS when reporting any issue. ::: Messages without supporting info will risk being sent to /dev/null