Nagios, maintenance windows and puppet

Stardate: 90721.31
Nagios is an excellent network monitoring service. It is used in production where I work. We wanted to be able to create maintenance windows using the web gui. (Actually we wanted a command line utility, but thats a separate post.) Turning off the default 'readonly' mode turned out to be a real pain and poorly documented. I ended up following the recommendations of this blog as well as some of the comments by readers. I also took the time to create a snipped of puppet code you can put in your manifests to make it easy to turn the command mode on. Note that the puppet code uses the default 'nagiosadmin' user and that it uses file_line from the puppet labs stdlib module. The code is available with syntax highlighting here.

  # the following is for enabling write access to the web gui
  if $readonly_web == false {

    file_line {.
      '/etc/nagios3/nagios.cfg-external-commands-yes':
        line    => "check_external_commands=1",
        path    => '/etc/nagios3/nagios.cfg',
        notify  => Service['nagios3'],
        require => Package['nagios3'];
      '/etc/nagios3/cgi.cfg-all_service_commands':
        line    => "authorized_for_all_host_commands=nagiosadmin",
        path    => '/etc/nagios3/cgi.cfg',
        notify  => Service['nagios3'],
        require => Package['nagios3'];
      '/etc/nagios3/cgi.cfg-all_host_commands':
        line    => "authorized_for_all_service_commands=nagiosadmin",
        path    => '/etc/nagios3/cgi.cfg',
        notify  => Service['nagios3'],
        require => Package['nagios3'];
    }   

    user { 'nagios':
      groups      => ['nagios', 'www-data'],
      membership  => minimum,
      require     => Package['nagios3'];
    }   

    file { '/var/lib/nagios3/rw':
      owner   => 'nagios',
      group   => 'www-data',
      mode    => '2710',
      ensure  => directory,
      require => Package['nagios3'];
    }   

    file { '/var/lib/nagios3':
      owner   => 'nagios',
      group   => 'nagios',
      mode    => '0751',
      ensure  => directory,
      require => Package['nagios3'];
    }   

  }