Uninstalling a program on a remote server with Nagios

[cwscribner]

Hi all.

Some good news on the client front. Nagios is replacing Solar Winds for my client. They're wondering if Nagios can do a remote un-install of Solar Winds for all of the servers that it touches. Is this possible given that Nagios has domain and admin access on the servers?

[mguthrie]

Nagios doesn't (by default) actually have root access on these systems, it just has permissions to run some select commands and script as defined by NRPE. I think for something like this a project like "Puppet" might be a better solution. That's a solution that's actually intended to be used for mass system management, while Nagios maintains the scope of monitoring.

[cwscribner]

So it seems as though the limitation is mostly in NRPE, correct? Is there a way to send a custom command through NRPE? For example, if I knew the location of the uninstall.exe file, could I run that through NRPE?

[mguthrie]

Yeah, you can create a custom command definition on the NRPE client and have it run whatever you want (within it's permissions), so as long as that's defined and executable it can be done. You would just need to push that new command definition out to all of the client NRPE configs and create a new check command in XI for it.

[cwscribner]

Hmmm, food for thought. Thanks!