You now have working binaries for the NSCA server — either compiled from sources or installed from packages. We can now proceed with configuring the NSCA server to listen for incoming connections.

There are a couple of ways in which it can be set up — either as a standalone process that handles incoming connections, as part of inetd (visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/inetd), or as the xinetd setup (visit http://www.xinetd.org/). In either cases, we will need a configuration file that will tell it which encryption algorithm to use, and the password that will be used to authenticate NSCA client connections. NSCA also needs to know the path of the Nagios command line.

The main difference between these two installation types is that the standalone version requires fewer resources to handle a larger number of incoming connections. On the other hand, inetd or xinetd based NSCA is much easier to set up. An inetd based setup is easier to maintain. Several inetd implementations...