Due to blatant idiocy of certain “admins” that cannot or will not correctly use/configure the Nagios NRPE server (dont_blame_nrpe should ONLY be allowed when listening on non-public links) another idiot (the nagios-nrpe-server Debian package maintainer) decided that he knows better than all other admins in the world and would save us all from certain misery. To do this he removed –enable-command-args from the build options and just crippled a large portion of all nagios installs world-wide that upgraded to this purposely broken package.

Fortunately we have the ability to correct such mistakes. Unfortunately that means more work for us.

Easy way to do it:

echo 'deb-src http://http.debian.net/debian jessie main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
apt-get install build-essential devscripts debhelper libssl-dev dpatch libwrap0-dev autotools-dev
apt-get source nagios-nrpe-server
ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libssl.so /usr/lib/libssl.so
cd nagios-nrpe-2.15/; vi debian/rules

In the rules file you will need to repair the damage by adding a –enable-command-args option. The correct build entry should look like the following:

override_dh_auto_configure:
        ./configure \
                --prefix=/usr \
                --enable-ssl \
                --with-ssl-lib=/usr/lib/$(DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH) \
                --sysconfdir=/etc \
                --localstatedir=/var \
                --libexecdir=/usr/lib/nagios/plugins \
                --libdir=/usr/lib/nagios \
                --enable-command-args

You will need to provide release information for the package by executing the following:

dch -i

afterwards a simple:

./configure
make all
dpkg-buildpackage
cd ..; dpkg -i nagios-nrpe-server_2.15-1.1_amd64.deb
service nagios-nrpe-server restart

Welcome back to intelligent system monitoring with a correct NRPE server.