Why doesn't nrpe find my file?

Question

I have a nagios check to report puppet run success/failures. The check runs fine locally:

$ sudo -u nrpe /usr/local/nagios/libexec/check_puppet_agent
I AM: nrpe
CRITICAL: Puppet daemon not running or something wrong with process

I am echoing the output of whoami for debugging purposes. Then I get the CRITICAL message because puppet service is stopped, that's fine. So far, so good.

However, when I run the check remotely from the nagios server, I get this:

$ /usr/local/nagios/libexec/check_nrpe -H MY-HOST -c check_puppet_agent
I AM: nrpe

UNKNOWN: last_run_summary.yaml not found, not readable

There seems to be some problem reading the filesystem. NRPE is not able to read the /var/lib/puppet directory when run remotely, but the nrpe user can read it fine locally. Why is this? What can be causing this error? The check is supposed to be run as the nrpe user, so why can't it read the directory?

Answer 1

Ok, apparently the problem was selinux. It was preventing process nrpe to access the /var/lib/puppet directory, so I had to taylor a selinux module with some rules to allow nrpe to run this check.