Notifications about hosts being DOWN or UNREACHABLE when they are UP

[Gerald Wichmann]

The below Nagios FAQ seems to address what I'm experiencing. All but 2 of my
hosts are not reachable by the central nagios server, thus when it attempts
to do a host check it of course comes back as UNREACHABLE in most cases.
Problem is the FAQ below doesn't tell you what to do about it. Modify my
check-host-alive command definition? To what in the case of a centralized
server only accepting passive service checks? Or is it simply more
appropriate to disable and ignore UNREACHABLE statuses?
 
My centralized server gets all checks from 2 distributed servers and cannot
directly check any hosts due to firewalls. Methinks the Nagios documentation
could use a bit more clarification on this type of configuration..
 
Appreciate any help
 
 
 
 
Title: Notifications about hosts being DOWN or UNREACHABLE when they are UP
FAQ ID: F0016
Submitted By: Ethan Galstad 
Last Updated: 07/24/2002
 
Description:
 
User is receiving notifications about hosts being in certain states (i.e.
DOWN or UNREACHABLE), when they are really in a different state (i.e. UP).
 
This seems to be one of the most common problems for new user of Nagios.
Most all of the time this problem is due to an incorrect command definition
for the host check command you specified in the host definition.
 
 
Solution:
 
Make sure that the host check command in your host definition is configured
correctly. The host check command is not a service - it is part of the host
definition. Also, the host check command is not executed at regular
intervals like a service is. Rather, it is executed only when Nagios finds
it necessary to check the status of the host.
 
Important! Just because you have a service that is monitoring ping
statistics for a host does not mean that the actual host status is being
checked. The status of a host is only checked when a service check results
in a non-OK state or if the host was previously down and a service check
results in an OK state.
 
Some symptoms of incorrect host check commands include:
 
   1. Hosts incorrectly being listed as DOWN
   2. Hosts incorrectly being listed as UNREACHABLE
   3. Alternating alerts/notifications about host problems and recoveries 
 
 
 
Related FAQs:
F0015 Hosts are incorrectly listed as being DOWN or UNREACHABLE
Keywords: host down unreachable up incorrect wrong notification
 
 
Gerald Wichmann
Senior Systems Development Engineer
Zantaz, Inc.
925.598.3099 (w)
 


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