Wishlist: RFC Style Document describing the NRPE Protocol

[andreas-marschke]

So currently there is no actual documentation regarding the contents of a TCP packet crossing the wire
in order to talk to an NRPE daemon or anything regarding the response judging from the actual source code (check_nrpe.c) there are also major flaws in the packet data sent by other perl implementations.

The best I could come up with so far as to what the packet consists of is described in share/protocol-nrpe.md which will definitely be refined as I get along.

For the forseeable future I'd wish for somebody to write an actual RFC style document describing the architecture of the request and response packets.

[mickenordin]

If someone wants to start working on this, here are some resources:

• https://sourceforge.net/p/nagiosplug/mailman/message/22857332/
• https://github.com/stockholmuniversity/nagios-nrpe/blob/master/share/protocol-nrpe.md

[mickenordin]

The packet structure can be forund in the nrpe source: https://github.com/NagiosEnterprises/nrpe/blob/master/include/common.h.in

typedef struct _v2_packet {
	int16_t		packet_version;
	int16_t		packet_type;
	u_int32_t	crc32_value;
	int16_t		result_code;
	char		buffer[MAX_PACKETBUFFER_LENGTH];
} v2_packet;

typedef struct _v3_packet {
	int16_t		packet_version;
	int16_t		packet_type;
	u_int32_t	crc32_value;
	int16_t		result_code;
	int16_t		alignment;
	int32_t		buffer_length;
	char		buffer[1];
} v3_packet;

[ziccardi]

@mickenordin Some years ago I implemented a Java and (more recently) a Javascript version of NRPE.
I'm in the process of regenerating their website, so I came across this doc.
Maybe you could be interested: https://ziccardi.github.io/docs/nrpe/protocol.

The JAVA version has a fully working jcheck_nrpe too (protocol version 2).

You can find docs about the JAVA implementation here.

Documentation about the other implementations is still to come.