CHECK_NRPE: Error - Could not complete SSL handshake AND cannot SSH into box or access it locally

Question

Nagios reported the following error: CHECK_NRPE: Error - Could not complete SSL handshake

Up until this point, everything had been running fine on this linux server for... months at least.

I attempted to ssh into the server and could not. I was able to ping the box. I hooked up a monitor and keyboard to the server directly (there is usually nothing hooked up to this server - I usually always ssh into it). I got the login screen and entered in my username/password. ...and then nothing. I wasn't able to access the machine.

I hard rebooted the server and it came back up fine.

What should I be looking for to figure out what happened? ie, What happened? What log files on the machine can I access? In looking at some of my logs, it looks like my background processes/software was running during the time the machine wasn't responding to my attempts to access it.

I need to run this to ground to ensure this doesn't happen again.

Answer 1

It varies by linux flavor, but generally there are some log files that can point you in the right direction.

In /var/log there will be logs that can be helpful. Depending on the flavor you should see either syslog or messages . Look at any other recently written logs in there as well.

It's also quite likely the issue is hardware related. You should perform a memory test during reboot. The process will depend on your boot loader or bios.

You can install a crashdump utility.

You can run fsck .