Installation

The installer uses MSI (msiexec) which means it is a standard Microsoft installer (now you should be happy). This in turns means you can use standard features to customize the installer in addition to some defines you can set specific to NSClient++.

Installation of NSClient++ is generally achieved using the graphical interface presented by the MSI package. You can choose which feature you want to install for the application. For example, to install NSClient++ without the firewall exception, you would disable the feature as shown in the following screenshot:

On the command line, the graphical interface can be called with the following command:

msiexec /i <<<MSI FILE>>>

Unattended install

In the context of deploying the application on computers in a large network, one would like to install NSClient++ automatically and quietly. Using msiexec, you can choose which features you want to install. As of now (version 0.3.8), the list of features presented by the package is the following:

• ProductFeature? -- Install the binaries of the application
  • MainProgram? -- Install the main program binary
  • FireWallException? -- Install an exception to the Windows firewall
  • ServiceRegistration? -- Register the NSClient++ service
  • Documentation -- Install the PDF documentation
  • Plugins -- Install plugins to NSClient++
    • CheckPlugins? -- Built-in checks for the system
    • NRPEPlugins -- NRPE listener, lets Nagios query for execution of a remote plugin
    • NSCPlugins -- NSClient listener, adds built-in check remote commands called with check_nt on the Nagios server
    • NSCAPlugin -- Plugin that submits passive check data to Nagios. Implements checks as a push to Nagios instead of a pull
    • SampleScripts? -- Install some sample client-side scripts to use with NRPE

To install NSClient++ quietly with all the features enabled, run:

msiexec /i <<<MSI FILE>>> /quiet

Quiet install without restart and with all features but the firewall exception:

msiexec /i <<<MSI FILE>>> /quiet /norestart ADDLOCAL=ALL REMOVE="FireWallException"

Passive install (displays progress bar) without restart and with several feature exceptions:

msiexec /i <<<MSI FILE>>> /passive /norestart ADDLOCAL="ALL" REMOVE="Documentation,NSCPlugins,NSCAPlugin,SampleScripts"

There is of course more you can do but this is a quick start. If you need more details lookup how to work with MSI.