File monitoring-plugins-smart-README.SUSE of Package monitoring-plugins-smart
Two notes about the plugin and the security:
1) Apparmor profile
If you enable Apparmor on your machine, there is a special apparmor
profile file:
/etc/apparmor.d/usr.lib.nagios.plugins.check_smart
that tries to encapsulate the script. But as there is currently no
special Apparmor profile for 'sudo' calls, once someone is able to
edit the script itself, he will be able to compromise your system
completely. But as the script is installed with ownership root:root
and permissions 755, it might already be a problem if someone is able
to edit this script...
2) sudo rights
The check plugin 'check_smart' uses sudo to call the smartctl command.
In openSUSE 11.4 and beyond, there is a special file:
/etc/sudoers.d/monitoring-plugins-smart
that contain the needed entry for sudo, so there is no need for manual
adaptions.
If you run this script on older distributions (als SLES 11 and SLES 10
is 'old' here as they contain an older sudo), you need to add a line
like the following one to your /etc/sudoers file (via 'visudo'):
nagios ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/smartctl