Installation¶

Installing NCPA on Windows¶

First, download the installer to the machine that you wish to install NCPA onto. The NCPA installer can be found at NCPA’s Windows Installer link.

Graphical Install¶

Navigate to the location that the install was downloaded, and double-click the installer. After agreeing to the license terms, you will find the configuration screen. This asks you to fill in some of the pertinent information.

The first thing you will see is the Active Specifications section. NCPA can be used as an active agent by simply entering a token into the text box and clicking “Next.” You must remember this token, and enter it when configuring the device within the Nagios XI wizard or using the check_ncpa.py plugin with Nagios Core. If you are setting up the agent to send passive results back to Nagios, additional information about its specifications, as well as the “Token” field are below.

• Token - This is the token that the NCPA agent will use as its form of authentication. You will need this token when setting up Nagios to monitor this agent.

The following are absolutely not necessary to fill out to get an active agent up and running on your system. These are for specifying parameters for the passive agent.

NRDP URL

This is the URL that the NCPA passive agent will send its check results. This is not necessary if you simply want an active agent.

NRDP Token

This is the NRDP token used to authenticate the passive checks being sent to Nagios. This is not necessary unless you are sending passive checks with NRDP via the NRDP URL field.

Hostname

This is the hostname that the agent will report back to Nagios as and has to be set up within Nagios.

Config Name

This is the NRDS config name that the agent will request when contacting the NRDS server.

Note

If you are using pasive checks, the initial install will use the same “NRDP Token” for NRDP and NRDS. If you want to change the value of any of these tokens you will need to edit the ncpa.cfg. See the Configuration section for additional information.

/<directive>="<value>"

ncpa-<version>.exe /S /TOKEN='fishingrocks'

Installing NCPA Using RPM Packing¶

First thing that must be done is acquiring the RPM package. The latest RPM package can be found on the Nagios assets site. Please choose the correct package from the following list of RPM-using distributions. Note these are links.

• CentOS 5.x

  • 32-bit
  • 64-bit

• CentOS 6.x

  • 32-bit
  • 64-bit

• CentOS 7.0

  • 64-bit

• openSUSE 13.x

  • 32-bit
  • 64-bit

Now that we have our RPM on our system, we simply need to use our package manager to install it. Many commonly used package managers have the ability to install a local package. However, in this example we will the rpm command. If you are using something like yum or zypper you can use that as well:

rpm -ivh --nomd5 <path to the NCPA RPM>

Now the NCPA services are installed and started.

You will need to modify /usr/local/ncpa/etc/ncpa.cfg to specify a community string in the [api] section and set it to your token:

[api]
community_string=<your token>

After making changes to the ncpa.cfg, restart the ncpa_listener for the changes to take affect:

/etc/init.d/ncpa_listener restart

To test your installation see Testing Your Installation.

Installing NCPA Using DEB Packaging¶

This section is largely the same as the RPM section above. The DEB package must be downloaded to the server you want to monitor, and then it needs to be installed. The latest DEB package is located as follows

• Debian/Ubuntu

  • 32-bit
  • 64-bit

Now that we have the DEB on our system, we simply need to install it. You can use any package manager you are comfortable with, but for the sake of portability, this example will use dpkg to install this particular package.

To install it, simply use apt-get or dpkg. The following example shows how to do it with dpkg:

dpkg -i <path to the NCPA deb>

Now the NCPA services are installed and started.

You will need to modify /usr/local/ncpa/etc/ncpa.cfg to specify a community string in the [api] section and set it to your token:

[api]
community_string=XXXXXX

After making changes to the ncpa.cfg, restart the ncpa_listener for the changes to take affect:

/etc/init.d/ncpa_listener restart

To test your installation see Testing Your Installation.

Install NCPA on Mac OS X¶

Download the NCPA DMG here . You will need to log in as root, or at least as a user who can run commands as root to continue with the installation. Then, depending on where you installed it (we will assume you downloaded it to your /tmp directory), run the following commands:

cd /tmp
hdiutil attach /tmp/ncpa-<version>.dmg
sudo zsh /Volumes/NCPA-<version>/install.sh

What this script does:

• Creates the folder /usr/local/ncpa if it does not exist
• Moves all necessary files there
• Sets the owner of /usr/local/ncpa to nagios:nagcmd
• Sets the mode of /usr/local/ncpa to 775
• Creates the group nagcmd if it does not exist
• Creates the user nagios if it does not exist
• Starts the listener daemon

If any of this fails, you will need to do the steps manually. The steps that may fail most often are adding users and groups. If they do, add the user ‘nagios’ and make sure the group ‘nagcmd’ exists and that ‘nagios’ user is in the group ‘nagcmd’.

Testing Your Installation¶

To ensure that installation was successful, try accessing the web interface of the agent. In order to this you will need to know

• The agent’s IP
• The token specified under [api] community_string (This is the token field in the Windows Installer)

Once you have these pieces of information you can attempt to connect to the web interface.

Where <agent’s IP> should be substituted for your agent’s IP address. When you access the web interface of NCPA you should be asked to provide the token from above.

This means your installation is working! You can now proceed.