Ssl – “Error: Could not complete SSL handshake. 5” in syslog of otherwise fine Nagios monitored host

Ok I finally got it working.

The problem was that both nagios servers are performing service checks and reporting results to master node, and all those check were performed perfectly. Master node had service freshness checking so if the monitoring servers could not complete checks master server would scheduled those checks from itself.

Anyways, new servers were on new ip range and by default nrpe port was closed on master server.

Opening the port solved the problem. Although it's still odd that it returned "Service check timed out" instead of "Socket timeout error".

I see one specific problem: your allowed_hosts in your nrpe.conf (on the client) should be set to the nagios monitor master host IP number. Setting this to local host means that your client and the monitor master are the same host (i.e. local) which is unlikely.

Another situation, sometimes remote plugins do not have encyption enabled, so when nagios issues the command connection to the remote npre fails. You can try checking nrpe with and without SSL encoding through a -n switch to check_nrpe.

In any event use the command, /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_nrpe and check the remote host nrpe from the nagios monitor master server. You get a lot of information that way.

EX: /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_nrpe -H HOSTNAME

If nrpe is not running on the monitored host, then you're not going to get anything back.