My last two posts, Starting NRPE via launchd and Nagios NRPE on OS X Server 10.5, concerned getting NRPE to run on OS X Server 10.5 and having it startup at system boot.
However, this is only part of the battle. Once you have Nagios monitoring setup on your server you also need to have some nice options for checking the availability of your running services.
Tim Wilson from the Savvy Technologist, wrote an NRPE plugin that helps out with this. The plugin check_osx_services does an excellent job of checking on the status for many services running on 10.5 Server.
The documentation on the plugin at the NagiosExchange site is pretty thorough. One thing that is not mentioned is that you will need to run the check_osx_services script as superuser since it calls the system level command serveradmin which must be run as root.
Last week I posted on how to setup NRPE on Mac OS X Server. Here is what you need to do to make it start up at system boot.
On a Linux or Solaris machine you can just include the call to the daemon in an init script like rc.local and it will be started when the OS boots. Unfortunately, Apple has made this a little more difficult on Mac OS X with Tiger and Leopard. The standard startup processes (cron, inetd, xinetd, etc.) have been rolled into a single process known as launchd.
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Recently I was tasked to install the Nagios add-on NRPE on two OS X 10.5 servers.
I read a little on the ‘net about it, but no one actually had much in the way of a walkthrough, so I thought I would fill the void.
The basic steps involve compiling the NRPE source, but doing so involves altering some of the code.
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