nrpe agent installation

[avijit_bhardwaj]

I am looking for a way to use space walk and deploy nrpe agent and plugins through EPEL channel. I can find nrpe 2.15 rpm on it however for plugins it seems to list the older versions:
[ ] nagios-plugins-1.4.16-10.el6.x86_64.rpm 2013-10-17 15:47 200K
[ ] nagios-plugins-all-1.4.16-10.el6.x86_64.rpm 2013-10-17 15:47 14K
[ ] nagios-plugins-apt-1.4.16-10.el6.x86_64.rpm 2013-10-17 15:46 64K
[ ] nagios-plugins-bdii-1.0.14-1.el6.x86_64.rpm 2011-12-12 18:08 7.9K
[ ] nagios-plugins-bonding-1.4-3.el6.x86_64.rpm 2014-07-29 17:51 25K
[ ] nagios-plugins-breeze-1.4.16-10.el6.x86_64.rpm 2013-10-17 15:46 14K
[ ] nagios-plugins-by_ssh-1.4.16-10.el6.x86_64.rpm

I believe the latest stable release we have is 2.03. Wanted to check below three things:
1) Will I get any issue installing old plugins?
2) Is it recommended to use the above approach to install nrpe agent or I might run into issues at later stages?
3) Do we have any document somewhere defining this approach.

Nagios XI version : Nagios XI 2014R2.7
OS : Rhel 5,6&7
EPEL library : https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/

[jdalrymple]

The nagios-plugins packages on the EPEL repo is controlled (obviously) by a public community and also has some guidelines regarding how it's deployed. For now the versions lag - we are trying to get some ability to maintain those packages ourselves, but it's something of a bureaucratic process to make that happen. That said hopefully the versions come in line not too far down the road. The other problem you may/will run into - if I'm not mistaken the EPEL packages of plugins install in /usr/lib[64]/nagios/plugins - this really isn't an issue since it's not on the Nagios box itself, but it's something to be aware of.

More directly answered:

1) Not likely - mostly newer versions are just small bugfixes
2) We wouldn't recommend it, but I don't think we'd outright discourage it either. We will still support your system.
3) No, we only document the fullinstall approach. https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nag ... g_NRPE.pdf

[avijit_bhardwaj]

Another thing when I compiled nrpe from epel I am not getting all the files under /usr/local/nagios and just the libexec (plugins).

[root@ausxxxxx03 nagios]# ls
libexec
[root@ausxxxxx03 nagios]# pwd
/usr/local/nagios

Also nrpe.cfg is located in /etc/nagios

[root@ausxxxxx03 nagios]# ls
nrpe.cfg
[root@ausxxxxx03 nagios]# pwd
/etc/nagios

But I am able to execute check_nrpe from xi server and we are also getting events:
[root@ausxxxxx00 libexec]# ./check_nrpe -H 10.xxx.xxx.xx -t 30 -c check_services -a snmpd
snmpd: 1

Apologize to intrude with basic queries however I am just trying to understand the best way out of it.

[ssax]

The default location for plugins is /usr/local/nagios/libexec, you can put them wherever you want but you would need to set the commands properly in your nrpe.cfg file.

If you compile and install nagios-plugins by default it will install in that directory as well, so it makes sense to use that as the default.