CMK version: 2.5.0p7 (Community version) OS version: N/A
Error message: Result from smbclient not suitable
Hello all,
I am still experiencing a steep learning curve while setting up proper monitoring. I already managed to create a hierarchical overview over our environment, server groups and services.
This did help us last week when some certificates had only a few days left which we almost missed.
Now, my current problem / challenge is to monitor some SMB/DFS network shares (no possibility to install an agent there).
There is no option in cmk to directly enter a DFS share string (“//domain/intermediate path info/share name”), but instead I could use the actual server and share name: “\\server_x\share_y”
Logging in works (Hint: use correct credentials!), but the check results in: “Result from smbclient not suitable”.
Forum and Google searches pointed to trouble with SMB / SMB2 /SMB3, but all I found was information at least 3-4 years old.
We are using CheckMK version 2.5.0 (in 2026); and this problem has not been solved in the meantime?
Did I maybe miss something? Are there other means to check network shares? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
The message „Result from smbclient not suitable” is unfortunately just a generic fallback - Checkmk shows it whenever it cannot interpret the reply from smbclient, so it hides the actual reason. The underlying problem can be anything from the SMB protocol version to authentication or the path itself.
The quickest way forward is to run smbclient manually on your Checkmk server, as the site user, with the same share and credentials:
smbclient //server_x/share_y -U 'DOMAIN\user%password' -c du -d 3
The real error message it prints will tell us what is actually going on. If you post that output here, we can narrow it down.
Regarding DFS: the share field does accept a path, so you can also try entering namespace/folder there and setting the NetBIOS server name to your domain - Checkmk passes that through to smbclient unchanged. Whether the referral is then resolved is up to smbclient, so it is worth testing with the manual command above before configuring it.
Thank you for your tips to further investigate the issue.
Since I cannot use the CMK server’s command line myself, I asked a colleague for help and together, we found out what was wrong.
In this case, it was the account I was using. Being a member of “protected users”, a fallback from Kerberos to NTLM is not allowed. This caused the somewhat misleading error message.
My colleague created a special “Checkmk check account” and now the checks work like a charm.