A simple NRPE alternative, based on bash, cron and NSCA
Monitoring remote hosts with Nagios can be done with various methods, ranging from snmp, ssh, nrpe, of a custom solution. To monitor some ‘black-box’ appliances with a very minimal OS-environment it wasn’t possible to install/run the NRPE agent. Since I seem to be using more and more passive nagios checks with the nagios service check acceptor (NSCA), it seemed like a good idea to try and use that.
I copied most of the checks to the system and setup the NSCA configuration (/etc/send_nsca.cfg), then I created a simple bash script which is scheduled to run from cron and loops through a list of service-checks to execute.
The check-results are then fed into send_nsca to finally arrive at the monitoring system. This way you only need to allow incoming traffic on 1 port to the nagios monitoring host and have no connections going into the device being monitored.
Update: The code has been updated and moved to my github account. You can find it at: https://github.com/sigio/sysadmin in the files monitor.sh and monitor.rc