1 SUPPORT
3 Using the mailing lists and tracker databases at SourceForge are the
4 best ways to obtain direct support for the Nagios Plugins. There may
5 also be commercial support options available to you -- check
6 http://www.nagios.org/ to track the current status of commercial
7 support offerings.
9 There are two mailing lists associated with Nagios Plugin development:
10 'help' (mailto:nagiosplug-help@lists.sourceforge.net), and 'devel'
11 (mailto:nagiosplug-devel@lists.sourceforge.net). Unless you are fairly
12 certain you have found a bug or that you are requesting a new feature,
13 please direct support requests to 'help'.
15 Because these lists are handled entirely by volunteers, and because
16 these same volunteers are often plugin developers who can also use
17 their time to fix bug and provide feature requests, it is generally in
18 you interest to do a modest amount of legwork before posting to either
19 of these lists.
21 Plugins that are in the contrib directories are provided as-is. We will
22 try to help, but sometimes the plugins have dependencies that the nagios-plugin
23 developers do not have access to. You may be able to try the authors
24 directly.
26 In brief, always provide the version of the software that you are
27 using, and when requesting features or reporting bugs, first check to
28 see that the issue has not already been addressed in the CVS tree.
30 GETTING HELP
32 Requests to 'help' require posting the version number of the
33 plugin. The best place to include the version information is in the
34 subject. A good post would have a subject like:
36 Can I use SSL with check_imap (nagios-plugins 1.3.0-beta2) 1.12
38 If you do not include the version of the plugin, you risk having your
39 post silently ignored.
41 Be advised that the core plugins (and in fact many of the contributed
42 plugins) will provide a description of their use when invoked with the
43 '--help' option. Please read the help carefully and in it's entirety
44 before asking for support.
46 REPORTING BUGS AND SUBMITTING PATCHES
48 Bug reports, investigations of possible bugs, feature requests, and
49 patch submissions should be submitted to the development list at
50 mailto:nagiosplug-devel@lists.sourceforge.net. Please raise a tracker first
51 in Sourceforge, otherwise your email is likely to be missed over time.
53 You should identify the version, preferably in the subject line.
54 However, to best use developer resources, it is suggested that you
55 reference your report to one of the following sources:
57 1) The most recent release, including beta's
59 2) The twice-daily snapshots (there's a link provided on
60 http://nagiosplug.sourceforge.net)
62 3) The current CVS tree from sourceforge
64 (This does not mean you should run any of these sources in a
65 production environment - the latter two you clearly should
66 not. However, if you find a bug, you should determine whether it is
67 still present in one of these sources, preferably either (2) or (3)
68 which are most recent.)
70 From experience, I know that most bugs can be fixed with only a few
71 more moments work than it takes to determine if the bug is still
72 present in the CVS tree. If you can save a developer the expense of
73 that time, you ensure that bugs are fixed more rapidly, and thus you
74 ensure your problem resolution is reflected in a stable release more
75 quickly.