Back in my Windows Server 2008 Server Manager, under Roles, I clicked on the new DHCP Server entry. Figure 8: DHCP Server management in Server Manager While I cannot manage the DHCP Server scopes and clients from here, what I can do is to manage what events, services, and resources are related to the DHCP Server installation. Oct 23, 2019 Once admins install and configure this setup, they can create monitors for Windows machines with the Nagios Remote Data Processor (NRDP) agent. Although the Nagios server itself installs on a Linux box, admins can install an agent on Windows systems to monitor those systems and report back to the main Nagios server.
Windows Server 2008 is a server OS that was produced by Microsoft. Being a successor of Windows Server 2003, it was next released in 2008, almost 5 years later. On 4th February 2008, the Windows server 2008 was discharged to manufacturing. It was commonly available from 27th February 2008. Its latest release was almost 10 years ago on 22nd July 2009, termed as 6.0 (Build 6002: Service Pack 2).
Windows Server 2008 was originally termed as windows server codename ‘Longhorn’. It was given its official title as Windows server 2008 by the chairman of Microsoft (Bill Gates) on 16th May 2007 at WINTEC during his keynote address.
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Microsoft Inc.
Download: Windows Server 2008 ISO
Before its manufacturing release, its three beta versions were released. On 27th July 2005 the first beta version was released. The second version was discharged on 23rd May 2006. On 25th April 2007, the third beta version was released. After that, on 24th September 2007, Release Candidate 0 was liberated to the public and the release candidate 1 was released on 5th December 2007. It was launched officially on 27th February 2008.
Features of Windows Server 2008 ISO
- The architecture and functionality of windows server 2008 is almost similar to windows vista due to the reason that it is built from the same code base as that of windows vista
- Due to the common code base, most of the security, management and technical features such as deployment and recovery, monitoring, some security features including ASLR and BitLocker, improved diagnostics, etc were automatically included
- A variation of installation termed as Server Core was included with windows server 2008, all maintenance and configuration are done with the help of command line interface windows.
- In Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2, the manner in which groups are qualified changed essentially with the presentation of the bunch approval wizard. The group approval wizard is an element that is coordinated into failover bunching in Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2. With the bunch approval wizard, a head can run a lot of concentrated tests on a gathering of servers that are expected to use as hubs in a group. This group approval process tests the hidden equipment and programming straightforwardly, and separately, to acquire an exact appraisal of how well failover bunching can be bolstered on a given design.
- For spanned and simple volumes, it has the capability of resizing the partitions of hard disk without stopping the server
Server manager
Server Manager is another job-based administration device for Windows Server 2008. It is a blend of Security Configuration Wizard SCW and Manages Your Server from Windows Server 2003. Server Manager is an enhancement of the Configure my server discourse that dispatches of course on Windows Server 2003 machines. Notwithstanding, instead of serve just as a beginning stage to designing new jobs, Server Manager assembles the majority of the activities clients would need to direct on the server, for example, getting a remote organization strategy set up, including more server jobs and so forth., and gives a solidified, entrance like view about the status of every job.
Windows Server 2008 Editions
Windows Server 2008 has maximum editions available in IA-32 and x86-64 versions. The editions included in windows server 2008 are-
- Windows Server 2008 Standard (IA-32 and x86-64)
- Windows Server 2008 Enterprise (IA-32 and x86-64)
- Windows Server 2008 Datacenter (IA-32 and x86-64)
- Windows HPC Server 2008 (Codenamed “Socrates”)
- Windows Web Server 2008 (IA-32 and x86-64)
- Windows Storage Server 2008 (Codenamed “Magni”) (IA-32 and x86-64)
- Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-based Systems
- Windows Server 2008 Foundation (Codenamed “Lima”) (x86-64) for OEMs only
- Windows Small Business Server 2008 (Codenamed “Cougar”) (x86-64) for small businesses
- Windows Essential Business Server 2008 (Codenamed “Centro”) (x86-64) for medium-sized businesses(Discontinued)
Windows Server 2008 R2
A second discharge, Windows Server 2008 R2, was discharged on October 22, 2009. Retail accessibility started on September 14, 2009. Windows Server 2008 R2 achieved RTM achievement on July 22, 2009. Like Windows 7, it is based on Windows NT 6.1. New highlights incorporate new virtualization highlights, new Active Directory highlights, IIS 7.5, and support for 256 sensible processors. Backing for 32-bit-just processors (IA-32) has been evacuated. On July 22, 2009, Microsoft formally reported that they had discharged the two Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 to assemble. Windows Server 2008 R2 was commonly accessible for download from MSDN and Technet on August 19 and for retail buy from October 22, 2009.
System requirements of windows server 2008 and windows server 2008 R2
For windows server 2008
The CPU requires a minimum 1 GHz of the processor for the 32-bit system and 1.4 GHz for the 64-bit system. Moreover, it is recommended to use a processor of 2 GHz or faster for better features.
The requirement for RAM is a minimum of 512 MB but the recommendations are of 2 GB or higher.
The minimum requirement of HDD for the foundation is 10 GB while in the case of other editions, 20 GB is required for 32-bit system and 32 GB for the 64-bit system. Moreover, for better use, the recommendations are of 40 GB or higher.
For windows server 2008 R2
The CPU requires a minimum of 1.4 GHz of the processor for the 64-bit system but for better use, 2 GB is recommended.
The requirement for RAM is a minimum of 512MB but the recommendations are of 2 GB or higher.
The minimum requirement of HDD for the foundation is 10 GB and for the other editions, it is 32 GB. For better use, one may use greater memory in all editions.
The requirement for devices is DVD drive, 800 × 600 or higher display, keyboard and mouse in both the cases.
Scalability
The following specifications of the hard drive are supported by windows server 2008 and 2008 R2-
- Physical processors-
- For windows server 2008, Standard: 4, Enterprise: 8, Datacenter: 32.
- For windows server 2008 R2, Standard: 4, Enterprise: 8, Datacenter: 64.
- Logical processors when Hyper-V is disabled-
- For windows server 2008, IA-32: 32, x64: 64
- For windows server 2008 R2, 256
- Logical processors when Hyper-V is enabled-
- For windows server 2008, IA-32: N/A, x64: 24
- For windows server 2008 R2, 64
- Memory on IA-32:
- For windows server 2008, Standard, Web: 4 GB, Enterprise, Datacenter: 64 GB
- For windows server 2008 R2, N/A
- Memory on x-64:
- For windows server 2008, Standard, Web: 32 GB, HPC: 128 GB, Enterprise, Datacenter: 1 TB
- For windows server 2008 R2, Foundation: 8 GB, Standard, Web: 32 GB, HPC: 128 GB, Enterprise, Datacenter: 2 TB
- Memory on Itanium:
- For windows server 2008, 2 TB
- For windows server 2008 R2, 2 TB
Installing windows server 2008 and 2008 R2
- Insert the installation media for Windows Server 2008 R2.
- Enter language and other preferences.
- Click Install now.
- Select Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise (Full Installation) and click Next.
- Read the license terms.
- The installer asks you which type of installation.
- The installer asks for disk location information.
- The installation begins.
- The installer prompts to change the password. Click OK.
- Enter a new password, re-enter the password to confirm it, and click the right-arrow.
- After you click OK on the confirmation screen, the operating system prepares your desktop.
- The Initial Configuration Tasks window appears by default. Windows Server is now installed. Windows Server prompts for activation information.
- Enter the Product Key and click Next to install Windows Server 2008 R2.
Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard ISO Download 64 bit
Windows Server 2008 is a server OS that was produced by Microsoft. Being a successor of Windows Server 2003, it was next released in 2008, almost 5 years l
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Operating System: Windows Server 2008 R2
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NRPE is the most common way to connect to NSClient.NRPE works much like NRPE for unix (if you are familiar with it) and in short you can say it relays a plugin request to a remote server.NRPE acts like a simple transport layer allowing remote execution. The difference between regular NRPE and NSClient++ is that NSClient++ has built-in checks.So with NSClient++ you get a lot of ready-to-use checks that wont require you to have scripts.But if you choose you can disable all “modules” and stick with a pure NRPE installation and only external scripts.
Overview of NRPE¶
For those not familiar with NRPE (Nagios Remote Plugin Execution) here is a quick introduction.
NRPE works much like SSH or telnet etc. It relays a command and awaits the result. In the above diagram what happens is:
- Nagios executes check_nrpe with the proper arguments.
- NSClient++ receives the command to be executed
- NSClient++ will execute the command and get a result on the form of
, and optionally - NSClient++ sends the result back to Nagios
- Nagios gets the result from check_nrpe (and uses it much like any other plugin)
So in essence NRPE is merely a transport mechanism to send the result of a check command over the network.
Nagios command line¶
NRPE require you to install a special plug-in on your Nagios server called NRPE.The unix-side of NRPE consists of a server and a client on Nagios you only need the client so you can skip any “servers” or what not that it want to start when you install it.
The client is (generally) called check_nrpe and works like so:
command
= The command (script) you want to run (often this is a pre-built command from within NSClient++)a
list
of
arguments
= a list of arguments for the command.
So the simplest way to see if things are a-working just run it without a command and you should get a response specifying the version of “NRPE” (in this case NSClient++) like so:
And again like in the NSClient example don’t worry if you get a timeout here since we have to configure NSClient++ before it actually works so this is expected.
NSClient++ configuration¶
Next we need to configure NSClient++ to allow the server to connect.The first thing you need to do to get things working is add the NRPEServer module.
If you have not already done so (above) you also need to set which computers are allowed to query the agent.This is set either under the
/settings/default
section (globally) or under the /settings/NRPE/server
section (locally).If you when you configured NSClient above set this globally you are already set to go. If not the key you need to change is the allowed hosts
.There is no password for NRPE.allowed hosts
= A list of addresses that is allowed to ask questions (i.e. your Nagios ip). The result should look like this (assuming your Nagios server ip address is 10.0.0.2):
After this restart the service.
Now feel free to try the command line agent again and hopefully things should work out perfectly.Run the following command from your Nagios server.
Finding and solving problems¶
A good way to find and solve problems is to run NSClient++ in “test” mode this is done by stopping the service and starting it in “test” mode.
When in test mode you will get a lot of interesting log messages when things are happening so it is fairly simple to figure out what is wrong.So lets try this now and start NSClient++ in test mode like so:
And you should see something along the following lines (it will look different depending on your setup):
Now you can run the command again from Nagios like so:
And if you check the log of
NSClient++ test
you will this time not see anything and this is because the “check version” is an internal command so lets try with something slightly more interesting:And don’t worry there is no foobar command but we will see how this looks in NSClient++
We shall get back a bit to this later on when we have configure NSClient++ more so lets leave this for now.
NSClient++ configuration (revisited)¶
Settin up NSClient++ was previously pretty simple and there is a bit more to it then we have thus far visited.This is because we have not configured anything yet all we can do now is talk to NSClient++ but not actually use it.So in this section we shall cover the basics and first off are some of the configuration options available for NRPE.
NRPE specific setting in NSClient++¶
ssl
If this is true we will use SSL encryption on the transport. Notice this flag has to be the same on both ends or you will end up with strange errors. The flag is set on check_nrpe with the -n option (if you use -n no SSL will be used).allow arguments
Since arguments can be potentially dangerous (it allows your users to control the execution) there is a flag (which defaults to off) to enable arguments. So if you plan on configure NSClient++ from the Nagios end you need to enable this. But be warned this is a security issue you need to think about. If you do not want to allow arguments you can instead configure all checks in the nsclient.ini file and just execute the aliases from Nagios. One important issue with theallow arguments
is that there are more then one! Yes, more then one! The reason for this is that you can allow arguments from NRPE and you can allow arguments for external scripts (it is not the same option) which might seem a bit confusing at first. But actually quite nice. Using arguments for external scripts can potentially be more dangerous than allowing them from NRPE (internal commands).allow nasty characters
This flag allows arguments to contain “dangerous” characters such as redirection and pipe (<>|) and makes things a tad more dangerous. But if you decide to use arguments you most likely want to use this flag as well. But again this is a security risk. Please also note this is also available for both NRPE and external scripts.Sinsecure
Allow legacycheck_nrpe
to connect.
So this if you enable this in the INI file you will end up with something like this (extract):
There are a lot of other options as well but these are the most used ones for details please refer to the reference section.
Modules¶
The other thing which you should configure is which modules to use.There is several modules which can be used to check various aspects of your system.So choosing which you need can be a bit of work.Here we shall start out with the basic ones and for details on the rest check out the [references section]/../references).
Module | Description | Commands |
---|---|---|
CheckSystem | Handles many system checks | check_cpu, check_memory etc |
CheckDisk | Handles Disk related checks | check_drivesize |
CheckExternalScripts | Handles aliases (which is what we will use) and external scripts. | N/A |
NRPEServer | Listens and responds to incoming requests from Nagios via NRPE | N/A |
… | There are a lot more modules | … |
The finished modules section from the INI file will look like so:
Now we have done some basic setup of NSClient++ and we can continue to try using it a bit more before we continue with configuring Nagios.
Nagios command line (revisited)¶
Now that we have the agent up and running (if not probably want to go back over the previous sections to get it up and running before reading on) what can we do with it?. From here on we will assume you have allow arguments and metachars enabled since it makes it simpler to try things out BEWARE that there are security implications to this so you might wanna read up before rolling this configuration into production.
As we stated before check_nrpe is a lot more powerful than the legacy check_nt and there is a lot of built in commands as well as a lot of external ones you can use.Lets start with a simple one CheckCPU and see how to use it.
If we check the docs for it it has an example like so:
Now this is a “nscp test mode command” so it is not usable in it self for you instead you need to change it slightly.The first word is the command and the rest are arguments.check_nrpe has two options for settings commands (-c) and arguments (-a) and is used like so:
in this case (CheckCPU) this translates to:
And that is as hard as it gets all you need to do is figure out which arguments you want to use for the command and stack them all in a long line.
Nagios configuration¶
Nagios configuration is in itself a whole chapter and this is just a quick peek on how you can do things. First off there are a few concepts to understand:
- templates are the same as the corresponding item but they have a flag register = 0 which prevents them from being listed
- services are essentially checks (is check CPU)
- hosts are essentially computers
- groups are an important concept which I ignore here for simplicity (I recommend you use it)
The configuration is at the end layer quite simple you have a “check” and a “host” and you connect them with a service. Like I show at the bottom line in the diagram above. Whats makes this a tad more complicated is that you can inherit things from a “parent” definition. Which is what I show with arrows (bottom to top) above. The templates with dashed lines are the base templates which all services and hosts inherit.
Template¶
First, its best practice to create a new template for each different type of host you’ll be monitoring. Let’s create a new template for windows servers.
Notice that the tpl-windows-servers template definition is inheriting default values from the generic-host template, which is defined in the sample localhost.cfg file that gets installed when you follow the Nagios quick-start installation guide.
Host definition¶
Next we need to define a new host for the remote windows server that references the newly created tpl-windows-servers host template.
Defining a service for monitoring the remote Windows server.
Service definitions¶
The following service will monitor the CPU load on the remote host. The “alias_cpu” argument which is passed to the check_nrpe command definition tells NSClient++ to run the “alias_cpu” command as defined in the alias section of the nsclient.ini file.
The following service will monitor the free drive space on /dev/hda1 on the remote host.