Use 'sudo -u nagios ...' under Ubuntu 12.04

[mkoistinen]

I've written this as an (anonymous) comment on the blog, but I'd like to post it here too for prosperity =)

I struggled to make this work as described above under Ubuntu 12.04. Using 'sudo' as specified made the command run as the root user, which, made the file /home/nagios/.my.cnf useless.

However, by changing the declaration in my nrpe.cfg file, it works as intended:

command[check_mysql_replication]=sudo -u nagios /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_mysql_replication -H 

This causes the command to run as the user 'nagios'.

It isn't clear to me why this is even required as I would have thought that the nagios commands would naturally run as nagios, but nothing works at all without the sudo stuff. Perhaps this is because Nagios doesn't have an environment normally, but by using sudo -u nagios, we're operating as the user nagios with the associated environment which may be required for mysql to reference the .my.cnf file?