NRPE/NSCA and SOAP/XML-RPC

[Ethan Galstad]

Hi All -

I'm planning a rewrite of the NRPE and NSCA addons to support multi-
line plugin output that should appear in Nagios 3.x.  In doing this, 
I was thinking that communication between the NRPE/NSCA servers and 
their clients should be done using SOAP or XML-RPC.  Any thoughts on 
this?

One big stumbling block to the adoption of SOAP/XML-RPC is the fact 
that encryption is needed in the data stream.  NRPE can use standard 
SSL to hide traffic (gSoap can handle this), but the traffic for NSCA 
is encrypted differently to both prevent replay attacks and provide 
some level of trust in the client.  Perhaps this means that it 
doesn't make sense to use SOAP/XML-RPC for the NSCA addon?  Or 
perhaps the entire SOAP message should be encrypted (as the non-SOAP 
message is now) before being sent, which would mean that I would need 
to write out the SOAP message myself, rather than using a library.

FYI, there are a few C SOAP libraries that I know of that could be 
used: csoap and gsoap.  Anyone have thoughts on these or other 
recommendations?  I'm leaning towards gsoap as it supports SSL, which 
would be required for the NRPE addon.




Ethan Galstad,
Nagios Developer
---
Email: nagios at nagios.org
Website: http://www.nagios.org



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