assuming, of course, you do mean nsca and not nrpe... nsca is like setting up a whole 'nother nagios instance, with some dummy notifications, dummy hostgroups, and other dummy settings, but with REAL checks, and piping all of that to your original nagios instance. i basically read and copied the scripts from the "distributed monitoring" section of the docs... <A href="http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/1_0/distributed.html">http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/1_0/distributed.html</A> just in case it's not clearer... nsca is when you want to have little "islands" of nagios running in different places, and reporting back to a "main" nagios instance... if you just want to run checks on remote systems, and gather the data, then you probably want to run nrpe... that's more of an "indirect check" <A href="http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/1_0/indirectchecks.html">http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/1_0/indirectchecks.html</A> fred <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> I've been puzzling over how to properly set up NSCA. I've successfully installed the server on the Nagios host, that part was straightforward. The part which is lacking clarity is the send_nsca piece. I realize it needs to be installed on a client host (compiled for that architecture). Setting up the config file seems clear. It would also seem to be a simple matter of catting a file and piping it into send_nsca (assuming it's formatted as required. But beyond this, this is where it seems to lapse into obscurity. I recall that the plugins need to be installed on the client as well (or whatever you feel like running, so long as you get the output and return codes that you need). So I'm guessing you cobble a script (which you kick off every 5 minutes from cron) to run each plugin with the parameters as desired, catch the return codes, stuff them into a temporary file, then pump the tempfile into send_nsca...? Am I on track here? Am I missing anything? </BLOCKQUOTE> <hr size=1>Do You Yahoo!? <a href="http://rd.yahoo.com/careers/mailsig/new/*http://www.hotjobs.com">HotJobs, a Yahoo! service</a> - Search Thousands of New Jobs