Version

Introduction

If you need to use the NRPE monitoring agent on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based system with SELinux or IPv6 enabled, installing it from the third-party EPEL repository is currently your best option.

In this how-to we will configure the repository and required packages on RHEL based systems.

Prerequisites

• Root access on the host
• A working Internet-connection

Installation

We first need to install the EPEL the repository and it's public GPG key. This is most easily done by executing one of the following commands:

# yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm -y

# yum install epel-release -y

# dnf install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm -y

# dnf install epel-release -y

# subscription-manager repos --enable codeready-builder-for-rhel-9-$(arch)-rpms
# dnf install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-9.noarch.rpm -y

# dnf install epel-release

If the installation of the repositories was successful, execute the following command to install NRPE:

# yum install nrpe -y

You should now have the NRPE monitoring agent installed. Information covering configuration NRPE can be found here.

Disabling the EPEL repository

Disabling the repository is optional, but it's recommended if you don't want software from EPEL to appear in your search results or install applications from it by mistake.
This is done by changing the value of "enabled" to "0" in the repository configuration file. The following sed command run on the OP5 monitor will do that.

# sed -i 's/enabled=1/enabled=0/g' /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo

The repository can be toggled in and out of use on the yum/dnf command line. e.g. If the repository has been disabled, it can be temporarily enabled during updates so the NRPE agent receives security and bug fixes:

# yum --enablerepo=epel update