Nagios Support Forum

Hi,

We do not use NSCA in our infrastructure and as part of a hardening project we are thinking about disabling NSCA and xinetd. I can see and nrpe xinetd service file but I don't this is being used as I tested disabling xinetd service and checks were still coming trough.

In there an official way for disable NSCA and xinetd? can both be safely disabled?

Hello, @monit_burb. You should be able to open the NSCA configuration file under:

/etc/xinetd.d

And change:

disable = no

To:

disable = yes

Then run:

service xinetd restart

Or if you just want to stop the xinetd service you can run:

service xinetd stop

Hi npolovenko,

My question really is if its needed by NagiosXI? I disabled xinetd and saw that checks were still being processed so I guess is just there for legacy purpose.

@monit_burb, It's used by NSCA and NRPE. If you're not using either one of these feel free to turn it off. Nagios performance will not be affected.

Hi,

The think is that I do use NRPE but after turning the whole xinetd service off, checks were being processed anyway and that puzzled me.

@monit_burb, Sorry, I forgot to add that if you compiled the latest NRPE v3 from Source it will run as a standalone "Nagios" daemon and not under xinetd. Either way, NRPE is only used when you're collecting data on this particular server and sending it over to another server. If all you do is checking services on different remote servers, the local NRPE agent is not used.

HI,

Now I get that what might not work if I disable xinetd are the local checks of the Nagios server itself. I have NRPE 3.2.1 that was installed by the Nagios installer itself but I do not know if it was compiled from sources or the installer downloaded some .rpm from Nagios servers.

We have is a fresh install of nagiosXI 5.4 so I guess it was compiled from source during the install because I just tested to force check some local services with xinted service disabled and they do work.

Thank you for your support, fell free to close the post.