This is a rewrite from the ground up of NRPE. This set of programs allows you to run Nagios check scripts on a remote host.
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Real, proper SSL (TLS, actually). The server/executor component needs a key and certificate, and can optionally validate clients against a provided SSL certificate authority (or the system one). The client also validates the server name given in certificates and can validate the certificate against the system CA list or a provided CA.
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Safe command-line argument passing. Arguments are passed without any interpolation to the check script. Missing arguments are simply passed as empty arguments. Quoting within the configuration file is respected.
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Named arguments are supported. If you had trouble working out what
$ARG7$ in your check script was for, you can now call it something sensible instead.
No. It has several weaknesses and issues that make it unsuitable:
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Its SSL mode does very little for security. It does not use certificates or keys. It simply does a plain DH Key Exchange using a well-known "secret", and cannot validate that the client or server it is talking to is correctly authorised. It prevents passive snooping of the connection, but does not help against man-in-the-middle attacks.
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Its command-line argument passing capability is riddled with security holes. All commands are run by passing them to a shell, which exposes a great number of attacks using shell expansion characters.
Why now? The command-line execution mode of NRPE was disabled in the packages currently (as of this writing) in Debian Jessie in response to CVE-2014-2913 (Debian bug #745272). I felt I really needed this functionality, but the bugs are too severe to fix properly. I felt that re-implementing it from the ground up with the features that I want was a good thing to do.
This project is not endorsed nor authorised by Nagios Enterprises, LLC. I just picked the name as it seemed to be a good name to describe an improved re-implementation of NRPE.
Copyright (C) 2014-17 Chris Boot bootc@bootc.net
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
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