Xymon 4.2.3. One of the DNS servers we monitor was down. The bbtest total time went from under 30 seconds to over 900 seconds almost all of which was for the DNS test.
This caused a number of problems. I removed the dns tag from the down server and the time dropped back to the normal level.
The mysteries to me are why did Xymon continue to test the DNS service on that server while the conn test was red? Why did it take 900 seconds for it to time out, even though I was running with --dns-timeout=60? ( I.e. I can understand that it might take longer than with the default dns timeout, but not 900 seconds.) The color for the dns test for that host was clear and displayed the following text:
Service dns on dns.server.org is OK Dialup host/service, or test depends on another failed test Host appears to be down
Timeout
Seconds: 900.042
It also stopped recording data in the graph.
And more importantly, is the behavior still the same in 4.3.9?
Thanks, Steve Holmes Purdue University