Checkmk Unknown error - Unable to figure out expiration date for domains

[swaroopchirayinkil (Swaroop)]

Hello Team,

Greetings …!

We are using the below version of checkmk for our monitoring purposes, and we use it to monitor websites.

Checkmk version: Checkmk Raw Edition 2.3.0p

From the day we configured checkmk we started noticing errors for certain domains as mentioned below.

Error: checkmk Unknown error - Unable to figure out expiration date for domains

Upon further checking we found that there is one script responsible for finding the expiration date of domains, the script location is mentioned below.

 /omd/sites/cmk/local/lib/check_mk/base/plugins/agent_based/check_domain.sh

The script is working fine and the domain has validity, but sometimes it shows unknown errors (false positive alerts in checkmk) - the issue becomes a headache for us. So we started testing the script from our local machine and from the checkmk server and noticed that the script failed to get the expiry date when run from the checkmk server.

Upon further investigation, we came to the conclusion that: for certain domains, the checkmk server executes the domain expiry check script (check_domain.sh) every 20 times and this is causing the domain registrar to block whois request coming from the checkmk server for a period of time.

We get the below error when this limit reaches from our checkmk server

eg: whois abc.com

Number of allowed queries exceeded.
fgets: Connection reset by peer

Question: To avoid this Whois check rate limit block what should we do, we have been looking for options to reduce the number of times checkmk executes domain expiry check for a domain.

There are around 90 websites monitored so we would like to limit domain expiry checks to be executed only one time a day globally.

Regards

SWAROOP B B

[aeckstein (Andre Eckstein)]

Hi Swaroop,

as you can see in the given path ~/local/.. the script is an extension that is not developed by checkmk but it as extensions that seems to be a classical nagios plugin ( maybe nagios-plugin-check_domain/check_domain.sh at master · oasys/nagios-plugin-check_domain · GitHub) that someone installed / copied there.

I assume that the shell script is executed with the rule " Integrate Nagios plug-ins".
And as this is a so called “active check”, that is being executed on the checkmk server, you can configure the interval of the execution of the script with the ruleset “Normal check interval for service checks”.

If i am right and the script is integrated as a classical nagios plugin, the correct path for the plugin should be ~/local/lib/nagios/plugins