Icinga - check_yum - Socket Timeout?

Question

I'm using the check_yum - Plugin in my Icinga-Monitoring-Environment to check if there are security critical updates available. This works quite fine but sometimes I get a " CHECK_NRPE: Socket timeout after xx seconds." while executing the check. Currently my NRPE-Timeout is 30 seconds. If I re-schedule the check a few times or executing the check directly from my Icinga-Server with a higher nrpe-timeout-value everything works fine, at least after a few executions of the check. All other checks via NRPE are not throwing any errors. So I think there is no general error with my NRPE-config or the plugins I'm using. Is there some explanation for this strange behaviour of the check_yum - plugin? Maybe some caching issues on the monitored servers?

Answer 1

First, be sure you are using the 1.0 version of this check from: https://code.google.com/p/check-yum/downloads/detail?name=check_yum_1.0.0&can=2&q= The changes I've seen in that version could fix this issue, depending on it's root cause.

Second, if your server(s) are not configured to use all 'local' cache repos, then this check will likely time out before the 30 second deadline. Because: 1> the amount of data from the refresh/update is pretty large and may be taking a long time to download from remote (include RH proper) servers and 2> most of the 'official' update servers tend to go off-line A LOT.

Best solution I've found is to have a cronjob to perform your update check at a set interval (I use weekly) and create a log file containing those security patches the system(s) require. Then use a Nagios check, via a simple shell script, to see if said file has any new items in it.