NRPE reporting caution---Setup problem-NOT a bug

Larry Bills larry.bills at mci.com
Mon Jun 30 20:03:30 CEST 2003


This was with version 1.2.5 of NRPE but would appear you can bite
yourself on all versions with this, as well as using NSCA for passive
checks.

It involved an oversight on our part that bit us hard one afternoon. I
am presenting it here to hopefully not have this happen to others.

We do not use the U or unknown feature of notifications for our
alerting. All notifies/pages are the result of Critical, Warning or
Recovery states.

A monitored server started acting strange, but found applications
running ok. Checking Nagios, found that it was reporting UNKNOWN on all
NRPE monitored processes on that server, yet no critical or other states
of those not using NRPE, so no alarms were sent out.

Logging onto the Solaris server, found one of the scsi cards had failed,
you got it, the one supporting NRPE plugins on the server, while the
other partitions were fine.

Since NRPE loads its binary with configs into memory, it was running
fine, however the plugins were not accessable due to the failure of the
partition associated with them, hence the UNKNOWN reply.

Since we use the UNKNOWN notification for other uses, it was not
possible to alert on it for the processes running on the server, and we
did not want numerous alerts going out one for each process, so for a
quick fix, instead of changing the NRPE code..which is not at fault
here, we run a check against a NRPE check_dummy plugin and alert the
server SA and the Nagios SA, if it returns UNKNOWN ...not great but
works for a quick fix.

Larry Bills




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