Hi guys!
I have to work with Nagios but I need to view the light at the end of the tunnel because by now, Im deep in the darkness trying to do something but i can resolve my proposal 
The situation is following, I have installed nagios sucesfully in a extensive area network with hundreds of stations. The private networks have static adressing but to improve the functionality of Nagios, Im searching the way to implement Nagios dinamically, i;m searching how to use a sniffer to check all the network and write in a file all the active hosts, must be some way to use this file with Nagios to configure the network and works with only the active devices. Its possible do something like this? any idea how to use sniffers and nagios like plugins or something? any help will be welcome!! thanks friends, take me out of the dark side
I just have to ask, why would you care if some host is not up if it’s not a server. Sorry, but I find this a futile effort when there is soooo much more that I know for sure, that you have NOT done with nagios.
Does your status map reflect every connection on your network for the switches/routers/servers. Do you show CPU usage on your routers, important servers, how about if the fans are running on your switches, what about the redundant power supply status of the router. Why in the world would you even care about some pc on a desk, when you have much more import devices to monitor.
I’m not triing to be mean or anything, just putting in my $.02. I know you must have a need to do this, but wouldn’t it be better to spend time on important things first, and if you ever run out of stuff to add and are bored to death, then attempt this.
Edited Fri Nov 04 2005, 05:48AM ]
You have to ask and I have to answer. At first I want to thank you your help, and let me explain the proposal…you are right when talks about monitoring important devices like switches, load on CPU, servers, etc but, what happens if your primary goal is not monitor the servers status? your primary objetive is to make some parts of the network (dinamically addressing subnetworks) works with nagos?? My first way is to use hostnames instead IPs but if the DNS is down Nagios will not work, the second (and i think the last one) is using a sniffer to detect IPs in the network and makes something to automatically write this Ips in the hostname.cfg directly to makes Nagios works…i know this is the more difficult way but if i can find how make this, Nagios will work in every network dinamically, wont be mandatory write each host in the .cfg, in an extensive network this is prety usefull, believe me 
, so…could be possible to make that a sniffer like nmap works in Nagios?? thanks again guys
If you are good at scripting, I’m sure that anything is possible. Just remember when you write the script, to restart nagios after you have altered the .cfg files. Nagios can use names instead of IP’s in case you wondered, as long as they will resolve.