User and group are hard coded in the init script

[Sebastian Kirsch]

Hi folks,

if you change the user and group of the icinga process in the icinga.cfg file, there is an error message during restart:

root@monitoring:~# LC_ALL=C /etc/init.d/icinga restart
 * Restarting icinga monitoring daemon icinga
chown: invalid user: `nagios:nagios'

The problem is the hard coded user and group in the init script, in line 126:

start () {
    ...
    chown nagios:nagios $DIRECTORY
    ...
}

That's why I would suggest following changes in the init script:

--- icinga 2012-01-16 07:42:34.000000000 +0100
+++ icinga-new 2013-06-01 14:55:10.545363714 +0200
@@ -89,8 +89,8 @@
 check_config () {
   if $DAEMON -v $ICINGACFG >/dev/null 2>&1 ; then
     # First get the user/group etc Icinga is running as
- nagios_user="$(get_config icinga_user)"
- nagios_group="$(get_config icinga_group)"
+ icinga_user="$(get_config icinga_user)"
+ icinga_group="$(get_config icinga_group)"
     log_file="$(get_config log_file)"
     log_dir="$(dirname $log_file)"

@@ -123,7 +123,7 @@
 start () {
   DIRECTORY=$(dirname $THEPIDFILE)
   [ ! -d $DIRECTORY ] && mkdir -p $DIRECTORY
- chown nagios:nagios $DIRECTORY
+ chown $icinga_user:$icinga_group $DIRECTORY

   if ! check_started; then
     if ! check_named_pipe; then

Thanks and kind regards,
Sebastian

System information:
-----------------------
Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS
Linux monitoring 3.2.0-45-generic #70-Ubuntu SMP Wed May 29 20:12:06 UTC 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Package information:
------------------------
Filename: pool/universe/i/icinga/icinga-common_1.6.1-2_all.deb
Size: 65268
MD5sum: 12b76eb3f7d40715acc7d380296042e5
SHA1: 6246778063486a0d69f0581edee6cd848e966484
SHA256: 56c50ada8e64134511b4f6322c4a95129e975b03c6481ae3f16ebc44782d7f24

[papukaija (papukaija)]

Thank you for your report and making Ubuntu better. I copied your proposed fix into patch. Thanks

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

The attachment "icinga.patch" seems to be a patch. If it isn't, please remove the "patch" flag from the attachment, remove the "patch" tag, and if you are a member of the ~ubuntu-reviewers, unsubscribe the team.

[This is an automated message performed by a Launchpad user owned by ~brian-murray, for any issues please contact him.]

[Alexander Wirt (formorer)]

JTFR I (the debian Maintainer) will never support changing the user icinga is running under. Any patch will therefore be ubuntu specfic.

[Sebastian Kirsch (kirsch-seb)]

Thanks for your answers.

@formorer:
Can you please explain the reason for never changing the user icinga is running as? I will not discuss your decision here. But I'm just interested in that. Perhabs I did something wrong if I want change the user.

[Alexander Wirt (formorer)]

Every nagios related component is configured to run as nagios:nagios, in that way running them on Nagios and Icinga is possible without much problems and we don't have to adapt any documentation for complicated setup steps. Just changing the user for icinga isn't enough, there have to be several changes on directory permissions too. So in short: its perfect the way it is and supporting installations that are not running under nagios:nagios isn't wanted - and if you ask me - its not neccessary. I / we invested a lot of work to take sure that installing Icinga (and a related stuff) is as easy as possible.