[op5-users] question about merlin poller/noc setup

[Christian Anton]

Hello!

I am trying to use merlin to set up a poller/noc setup and i have 
several questions:

Is my understanding right every of the nagios boxes will have its own 
database? Or is it sufficient for the pollers having merlin installed 
_without_ an own database? Having multiple databases, will all databases 
contain the same data? Or are only databases of peered nodes equal?

In a poller/noc setup, must both machines have the exact same 
configuration files? In my case the poller would serve a vpn-connected 
location. If poller goes down there will be no possibility (routing) to 
check these services from the central machine.

In my tests with the "next" head merlin installed on CentOS5/nagios 
3.2.0 on two hosts i had to install only the hosts which had to be 
monitored by the peer to the peer's configuration files, otherwise the 
peer and the noc did loadbalancing on the hosts which are not included 
in the hostgroup which is "delegeted" to the poller.

Example:
NOC has configs for host1, host2, host3 while host2 and host3 are in the 
hostgroup "remotehosts". This hostgroup is set up in merlin.conf to be 
delegated to the poller.

POLLER has configs only for host2 and host3, and also has them in a 
hostgroup "remotehosts". If this node's configuation contained host1 
also, load-balancing would be done for host1.

This setup worked for me but changing configuration or sometimes simply 
restarting the nagios daemon on one side resulted in a crash of the 
nagios daemon on the other side. I would like to know if that is because 
of my configs or if the poller/noc architecture is still a bit unstable 
in merlin.



Best regards


Christian