Nagios-Plugins Web Site Taken Over By Nagios

New submitter hymie! writes "Nagios is a commonly used IT tool that monitors computers, networks, and websites. It supports the use of plug-ins, many of which were developed independently by the community. Holger Weiß, formerly of nagios-plugins.org, announced that 'Yesterday, the DNS records [of nagios-plugins.org] were modified to point to web space controlled by Nagios Enterprises instead. This change was done without prior notice. To make things worse, large parts of our web site were copied and are now served (with slight modifications) by Nagios. Again, this was done without contacting us, and without our permission. This means we cannot use the name 'Nagios Plugins' any longer.' Further discussion is available in a Bugzilla thread."

Switched to Icinga a long time ago

[Anonymous Coward]

So far I have not looked back once.

Re:similar

[Richard_at_work]

Looks like Nagios Plugins was a community project to provide plugins for Nagios, with little to no input by Nagios themselves. At some point in the past, the website name was transferred to Nagios to avoid trademark issues but the project continued to be community driven and led. Now, Nagios has redirected the DNS to its own plugins website, forked the community codebase, setup an entirely new developer base and taken the company line that "monitoring plugins (the name chosen by the original nagios-plugins project leads) is the fork, not us".

Reading the propaganda by the Nagios rep on the bugzilla thread is highly amusing, smacks of Eurasia and East Asia from 1984.

If all of this is even mildly true, its quite an evil thing by Nagios to do.

Re:Suprise, not really

[paziek]

They (Nagios Enterprises) requested it. I didn't see mention of why they did, but I would guess it was trademark issue. They were supposed to let them use it independent of Nagios Enterprises, but seems like 3 years was all they could get on this deal. From what I read in their discussion, reason for takeover are mentions of compatible competition on main site of old Nagios Plugins.

Re:Not a registrar problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

So really the company just decided they want control of the server now instead of pointing their domain to a third party. Nonstory.

You apparently decided to read the article on this occasion, but inexplicably stopped after the second link.

3.3/10 for effort but could try harder.

Re:Not a registrar problem.

[Richard_at_work]

The story is a but more than that - they took the website almost as-is, forked the codebase and are portraying themselves as the original project with a new developer base, insisting the original developers are the fork.

If they had switched the domain to a brand new website and started from scratch, that would be your non-story...

Alternatives...

[ptudor]

After having the good fortune to spend a few weeks testing everything free, I've got to spend a minute evangelizing for Zabbix.

It took me a week to understand the concepts, but the clone button and templates make Zabbix my favorite tool. The local Zabbix agent on each host gives detailed metrics and the screens of graphs are great.

Check out the appaloosa-zabbix-templates for more MySQL and Memcache charts than you ever thought might work out of the box.

Zabbix is ridiculously powerful, from auto discovery on subnets, to simple ping and snmp, up through more advanced tools.

Re:Shitting all over your most supportive users

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but Nagios hasn't cared much about it's users for some time now. It worked when they were the only game in town[1], but these days you can choose to use Icinga or even Sensu; both of which are far better products than Nagios and support Nagios plugins.

[1]: Well O.K, there's OpenNMS, but that's network oriented rather than infrastructure so it's not a direct comparison.

Re:Copyright violation.

[mysidia]

Yeah, and that would hold weight if you weren't using their trademark all over your site.

I think you don't get it... the Nagios Plugins project pre-dated Nagios. The Nagios Plugins Project was renamed from The NetSaint plugins project due to trademark issues. Nagios was an acronym for "Nagios Aint gonna insist on Sainthood"
The open source project was using the name before Nagios Enterprises was founded, and these development teams, therefore have prior use of the name Nagios.

They were apparently tricked into handing over control of the domain to the guy who founded Nagios enterprises later.

Re:Alternatives...

[Michael Friedrich]

The funny thing is, that Nagios Enterprises didn't write Nagios 4.0 - that work was done by Andreas Ericsson who works for op5. So instead, you should call "Nagios 4 Core" "op5 Core" if you're looking for the who-did-write-it. The sad thing is, that Nagios Enterprises kicked out Andreas Ericsson out of the Nagios core development after recognizing that people actually knew that Andreas was the only core developer at that time - working for a competitor. Andreas forked Nagios 4 into Naemon abandoning the dictatorship by Nagios Enterprises. You may find their website interesting but there more interesting read is located here in terms of the Nagios Plugins project: https://www.monitoring-plugins.org/archive/devel/2014-January/009432.html [monitoring-plugins.org] If you're interested in more details, the announcement happened on last years OSMC http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgbbyyNIiHc [youtube.com] So other than the clusterfuck by Nagios Enterprises in regards of lying to the community again, they've lost their last core developer and there are fellow forks around the corner filling the gap. If you're questioning yourself - I am the lead core dev of Icinga, but what's written here is my sole personal opinion.

Re:Somone had to plug icinga

[Michael Friedrich]

Actually Icinga was forked off Nagios 3.2.1 and some patches ahead. Meanwhile we've ported plenty of Nagios patches, but also sent them Icinga patches. At some point, they've removed the Icinga copyright on those patches, and banned me from their bug tracker. But since people had been asking quite often, which patches and features are exclusive to Icinga, I had compiled a periodically updated table with all details exposed. https://www.icinga.org/2011/11/03/icinga-vs-nagios-a-developers-comparison/ [icinga.org] And while we're still working on the 1.x branch, we're preparing Icinga 2 and Icinga Web 2 for their first final releases, overcoming long lasting problems (such as an integrated cluster stack, or recurring downtimes).

Re:Shitting all over your most supportive users

[jon3k]

http://www.zabbix.com/license.php [zabbix.com]

If you use ZABBIX in a commercial context such that you profit by its use, we ask that you further the development of ZABBIX by purchasing some level of support.

Just fair warning.