Difference between timed out & ttl exeeded?

Hello,

what is the meaning of a plugin timeout? This plugin is about a ping, does this mean that the service could not reach the host or that there is a problem with the check_ping?

***** Nagios *****

Notification Type: PROBLEM

Service: PING
Host: VCE-RTR-COLT
Address: 10.149.186.5
State: CRITICAL

Date/Time: Tue Dec 30 11:02:56 CET 2008

Additional Info:

CRITICAL - Plugin timed out after 12 seconds

and sometimes we get another error: TTL execeeded.

***** Nagios *****

Notification Type: PROBLEM

Service: PING
Host: VCE-RTR-COLT
Address: 10.149.186.5
State: CRITICAL

Date/Time: Tue Dec 30 11:02:56 CET 2008

Additional Info:

CRITICAL - Plugin timed out after 12 seconds

What is the difference between the two? If you’re icmp packets are taking to long to reply, I can imagine that you receive a message like TTL exceeded. If you’re host doesn’t respons you get host down… but plugin timedout?

Thank you very much in advance

TTL is a period for one packet in ping, and timeout is a plugin varible which tells the OS, if plugin is still in execution after timeout value is exceeded then kill it.