Nagios XI local account

[meganwilliford]

We are looking for some more information regarding the nagios account that Nagios XI runs as. As the default the local account Nagios XI runs as, along with other components such as MariaDB, is nagios. Is it possible to change this account to something other than nagios?

[benjaminsmith]

Hello Megan,

You can change the default passwords and we have a guide on how to do that, but changing the default nagios account on the system to something else may cause issues as this account is also used by other programs besides Nagios XI such as plugins and agents.

See: How to Change Default Passwords

Let me know if you have additional questions.

[meganwilliford]

Okay thank you! Do you think there would be any issues if we created that nagios account as an ldap account?

[benjaminsmith]

Hi Megan,

We don't have an official guide for setting this up, and typically this would be handled by your companies systems administrator. After discussing this with the support team, a few things to note:

* The nagios user account cannot expire.
* The sudoers file is used to allocate rights to the nagios account, so managing the nagios account via LDAP would require configuring the LDAP sever to store/manage the sudoers file.

If you decided to implement this, we value your feedback on the process and let us know if you have any more questions.

[meganwilliford]

Thanks for the feedback. One more question - you mentioned that changing the default nagios account on the system to something else may cause issues because it's used by other programs such as agents. Are you referring to the NCPA and that it also needs to use nagios as the account? In the config file it looks like we're able to change the NCPA account to something other than nagios. If it changed to something other than nagios could that also cause issues?

[benjaminsmith]

Hi Megan,

Yes that's correct NCPA, plugins and other agents will use the nagios account. Additionally, there are a number of back-end bash scripts in Nagios XI for managing services along with the sudoers file. Changing the account name to something else will also affect those.

[meganwilliford]

Just to clarify, does the NCPA need to run as nagios on the Nagios XI server it is installed on only or does it also have to run as nagios on any server being monitored with NCPA installed on it?

[benjaminsmith]

Hi Megan,

Yes, that's right. On the Nagiso XI side the check_ncpa.py plugin will run as nagios, and on the remote host the NCPA listener is running as nagios. For windows systems, the NCPA service is running as a local system account on the remote host.

[meganwilliford]

Great, thanks for all of the clarifications!

[benjaminsmith]

Great, thanks for all of the clarifications!

Your welcome!