nrpe strangeness

[waltbulk]

Hi. I'm hoping someone has an answer for me.

I'm NOT running the nrpe through inetd. It is just run from startup. It is started
from rc3 and just stays running.
-bash-3.2# ps -ef |grep nrpe
nagios 16214 1 0 15:33 ? 00:00:00 nrpe -c /etc/nagios/nrpe.cfg -d

If I have something in /etc/hosts.allow /etc/hosts.deny, I get socket timeouts
with error messages in the log:
Error: Could not complete SSL handshake. 5

If it's not running from xinetd/inetd/etc to use a tcp wrapper, why does something
in /etc/hosts.allow(deny) even affect it at all? I'm a bit perplexed about this. The
entry for ALL in hosts.allow would allow the connection as it is fairly broad, so it's
not a matter of the allow file stopping it, since it ends up flapping with sometimes
getting a return, and sometimes socket time out. But I don't think it should even be
looking at allow/deny since it not being tcpd wrapped.

At first I didn't believe it was hosts.allow/deny but turning on hosts.allow/deny clear
triggers the flapping/timeout/alerts. Anybody have any idea why this might be?

[waltbulk]

bad tech, no cookie. I should know better than to post a request with incomplete info.

nrpe version is 2.12 that is having this issue on a RHEL5 box.