guys I was using check_dns before but it would constantly give me random timeout alerts although dns is fine. Considering that nslookup is being phased out anyways I decided to give check_dig a try. It works better but seems to have a bug related to the warning timeouts. Check this out : [root@nagios stucky]# /usr/local/nagios/libexec/check_dig -w 1 -c 2 -H {nameserver} -l {fqdn} -a {ip} DNS OK - 0.008 seconds response time ({fqdn} 38400 IN A {ip})|time=0.008196s;1.000000;2.000000;0.000000 [root@nagios stucky]# /usr/local/nagios/libexec/check_dig -w 1 -c 2 -H {nameserver} -l {fqdn} -a {ip} DNS WARNING - 0.011 seconds response time ({fqdn} 38400 IN A {ip})|time=0.011227s;1.000000;2.000000;0.000000 Have I totally gone nuts or did I not just tell check_dig to only warn me if the query takes more than one second ? As you can see the tool itself reports it took only 0.011 seconds so why the warning ? It's annoying cause I get those random fake alerts and another recovery messager soon after. Thing is even if I totally leave the -w and -c flags out it'll still do that as if it had a hardcoded value between 0.008 and 0.011 in there that can't be changed. This is from nagios-plugins-1.4.2. -- stucky