NSClient and Echange Servewr

[Steve Shipway]

>I found a post saying that Exchange servers "hog all ports"?
>
>I have tried a plethora of ports and nothing seem to work, I 
>just get "connection refused". But it appears to be NSClient 
>that listens to that port (since if I stop the service, 
>whatever port I have put it on (e.g. 1248, 1996, 19916, 42145) 
>no longer appears in "netstat -a". Server is a Windows Small 
>Business Server 2000 running Exchange and SQL 2000.

We are using nsclient here to monitor our exchange server, and it works.
But...

Exchange, in its default configuration, will start grabbing ports from 1024
upwards.  On any reasonably loaded machine, it will have grabbed the default
pnsclient port in fairly quick order.

You have three options!
1) Install pnsclient.  Shut down exchange (freeing up the port), start up
pnsclient, start up exchange.  Next boot up, pnsclient will grab its
preferred port before exchange has time to do so.
2) Make the necessary registry settings so that exchange starts grabbing
ports from a higher number (eg, 20000).  I can't tell you the registry key
(our NT guy did this) but apparently its on the MS support site.
3) Use a non-standard port.  Set your pnsclient agent to run on a very high
numbered port (eg, 65432).  Then use this same port number for querying it
on your nagios server, of course.  This works, but is a nuisance if you want
to have things easy to maintain.

(We did #2).

Hope this helps,

Steve

---
Steve Shipway: ITSS, University of Auckland
Email: s.shipway at auckland.ac.nz  Web: http://www.steveshipway.org/  
** We can only discover new oceans when we have the **
** courage to lose sight of the shore.              **
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