NSCA's got me stumped

Nagios
1

So I’ve decided to cross-check my local services on remote hosts from a second Nagios server (my first is checking such services with NRPE), and I’ve decided to do so with the help of NSCA.

I havne’t tried installing on any of my *nix systems yet. I just downloaded thesend_nsca service for Windows, but I can’t figure out what else is needed. I understand that for *nix systems, I’ll be installing a mini-nagios setup to run these checks. Is something similar required for NSCA?

Additionally, I installed the daemon on my Nagios box. No encryption, no passwords, no inetd or xinetd; keeping it simple here. All I’ve done is started NSCA up, modifying the nsca.cfg file to accept traffic from my hosts. I haven’t modified any config files for this. I have a server already running Nagios, on which I’ve placed the send_nsca service. When I run this:

./send_nsca -H -p 5667 -c send_nsca.cfg

I get the following error:

Connection refused or timed out
Error: Could not connect to host 207.234.130.233 on port 5667

Not sure what’s causing this or what I’m missing. I guess I also don’t understand how the send_nsca command pulls the information from the server to send to the Nagios server.

Sorry if that’s a dumb question. I’m stepping into new territory here, and I’m having trouble finding documentation for this.

2

check the NSCA sticky thread i’ve found many interesting informations there :slight_smile:

Luca

3

Yeah, I’ve been following that (jakkedup’s instruction helped me understand what oscp is), so thanks for the advice…but I’ve encountered a bit of a problem understanding one bit. I don’t want to re-post it here; that’d make it a double-post.

4

grep nsca /etc/services
nsca 5667/tcp # NSCA
Do the above on the Central nagios server, the one running nsca daemon. if you don’t get a good grep, then edit /etc/services. This is in the README with nsca.

No matter what OS you have for the remote system, you must get the data from the check, to the send_nsca command.
With a remote linux box, you could have a mini nagios setup, as you stated, or run cronjobs. In Windows, you could run your checks with the scheduler. These checks will simply be scripts or bat files. These .bat files, will have to provide the following to the submit_check_result script
host_name, svc_description, plugin_output