nrpe in a CPanel managed machine.

[chenry-melb]

Hi this is my first post to this forum so I am sorry of I have picked the wrong area. This appeared to be correct, hopefully this may help others.

After a recent automatic update I started to receive warnings from my Nagios system of all the NRPE monitored services on a remote CPanel hosted machine. Nagios would give the following type of error

CHECK_NRPE: Error - Could not complete SSL handshake.

Investigation of logs showed:

nrpe[28615]: warning: cannot open /etc/hosts.deny: Permission denied

In this system, I believe CPanel is forcing permissions on the hosts.deny file to be Root RW only and so checks by NRPE cause it to fail. Note I am running NRPE in Daemon mode not under the XInetd superdaemon.

Resolution: Add an entry to the hosts.allow file, this is checked first and nrpe will not check hosts.deny if it succeeds on the first check. hosts.allow has a Public readable permission.
e.g.

nrpe: aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd : allow

Where you replace aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd with the address of the machine hosting your NAGIOS service.

[slansing]

Did the resolution you posted fix this issue for you?

[chenry-melb]

Yes, The above resolved the issue for me.