Yey !! That totally did it. Thx AZ I hadn't even considered messing with the resolver cuz I was sure it was a nagios issue so I had to fix nagios. If that wasn't a text book example of how well mailinglists can work then I don't know what is... thx <div>On 11/7/06, Az <<a href="mailto:az@whoever.org">az@whoever.org</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> stucky wrote: > I use the check_by_ssh plugin for most of my stuff and I noticed that > if the primary nameserver is unavailable nagios starts freaking out. > All of a sudden all plugins time out. I tested it using the 'host' > command and it only takes about 1 second longer to lookup hosts using > the secondary nameserver. > The default timeout for check_by_ssh is 10 seconds. I cranked it up to > 30 and still I get timeouts. I'm not sure I understand that one. > Has anyone else seen this. We had a similar issue in that our primary DNS was doing strange things, and it quite often took 5 or even 10 seconds to perform a DNS lookup. What we were seeing was 70% of service checks (and subsequently host checks) failing by timing out. The key was the multiple of 5 seconds. The resolver timeout on, say, RHEL3 is based on RES_TIMEOUT in resolv.h... which was 5 seconds. We added the following to our resolv.conf , and found the problems went away: options timeout:2 rotate This sets the timeout for waiting for a reply to 2 seconds, and tells the resolve to rotate through your 'nameserver' entries rather than always hitting #1, then #2, etc. Cheers. </blockquote></div> -- stucky