NagiosXI check_by_ssh plugin installation

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bryan.tiamzon
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Mar 03, 2015 7:17 pm

NagiosXI check_by_ssh plugin installation

Post by bryan.tiamzon »

Hi Team,

check_by_ssh plugin is missing. I checked /usr/local/nagios/libexec and I could not find it.
We used the offline RPM Tarball that could be found here: http://repo.nagios.com/. I tried to use yum to install the packages (openssh-client and nagios-plugins-by_ssh packages ) but there is no package available. I'm not sure if openssh-client and nagios-plugins-by_ssh packages are included in the offline RPM tarballs.

Below is the result when I check if openssl dev package was installed.
# rpm -qa | grep openssl
openssl-1.0.1e-30.el6_6.5.x86_64

I downloaded the latest plugin installer package (http://nagios-plugins.org/download/nagi ... 0.3.tar.gz) but I am not sure how to install only the missing package that we need.

Please help us install check_by_ssh plugin. I found out that we could use this plugin to monitor remote servers without installing agents (http://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nagi ... ng_SSH.pdf).

Thanks!
jdalrymple
Skynet Drone
Posts: 2620
Joined: Wed Feb 11, 2015 1:56 pm

Re: NagiosXI check_by_ssh plugin installation

Post by jdalrymple »

A couple of things to note...

1) check_by_ssh is installed by default, you might want to look at your install.log if you still have it to see why it didn't install. Here is the relevant line from my install.log:

Code: Select all

libtool: install: /usr/bin/install -c check_by_ssh /usr/local/nagios/libexec/check_by_ssh
2) the easiest way to get check_by_ssh installed on your system at this point may be to just pull down the source, compile and then copy it into your libexec directory. I would *NOT* recommend doing make install, just compile then copy the check_by_ssh binary only from the resulting plugins directory into your /usr/local/nagios/libexec directory. If that's not something you feel comfortable doing, we can walk you through the process.

3) Lastly, I'd like to impress upon you that setting up check_by_ssh is going to be far more time consuming and less flexible and result in much more customization that would installing the agents on the machines. There are use-cases for using check_by_ssh, but I wouldn't recommend it because it sounds in any way simpler or quicker than installing agents.
bryan.tiamzon
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Mar 03, 2015 7:17 pm

Re: NagiosXI check_by_ssh plugin installation

Post by bryan.tiamzon »

Hi Team,

1) check_by_ssh is installed by default, you might want to look at your install.log if you still have it to see why it didn't install. Here is the relevant line from my install.log:

- I checked install.log and didnt find any related line regarding check_by_ssh
- The installer package that I used is the Offline RPM tarball. It is possible that check_by_ssh package was not included in the Offline RPM tarball package? It says here (http://support.nagios.com/forum/viewtop ... f=6&t=3473) that nagios had a kink in the CentOS 6 base package not including the openssh-client by default so those plugins didn't build during the compilation.

2) the easiest way to get check_by_ssh installed on your system at this point may be to just pull down the source, compile and then copy it into your libexec directory. I would *NOT* recommend doing make install, just compile then copy the check_by_ssh binary only from the resulting plugins directory into your /usr/local/nagios/libexec directory. If that's not something you feel comfortable doing, we can walk you through the process.

- Please walk me through the process. We really need to use this plugin for servers where we could not install or not allowed to install software package.

3) Lastly, I'd like to impress upon you that setting up check_by_ssh is going to be far more time consuming and less flexible and result in much more customization that would installing the agents on the machines. There are use-cases for using check_by_ssh, but I wouldn't recommend it because it sounds in any way simpler or quicker than installing agents.

- As of now, we are doing NagiosXI evaluation with a view to go to a full unlimited enterprise supported version. We are going to use agent to most of our servers. We are going to use the said plugin for the servers where we are not allowed to install software agents.

Thank you for your help.
jdalrymple
Skynet Drone
Posts: 2620
Joined: Wed Feb 11, 2015 1:56 pm

Re: NagiosXI check_by_ssh plugin installation

Post by jdalrymple »

I performed this on a fresh CentOS 6.6 box and it achieved the necessary goal. You may need to adjust the nagios user and group arguments in your configure statement.

Code: Select all

yum install -y openssh-clients gcc automake autoconf wget
wget http://nagios-plugins.org/download/nagios-plugins-2.0.3.tar.gz
tar -xzvf nagios-plugins-2.0.3.tar.gz
cd nagios-plugins-2.0.3
./configure --with-nagios-user=nagios -with-nagios-group=nagios --with-ssh-command=`which ssh`
make
cp plugins/check_by_ssh /usr/local/nagios/libexec/
Let us know how that goes.
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