Why does my system keep contacting conncheck.opensuse.org ? 100's of times a minute

English Network/Internet
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I have several openSUSE installs, mostly Tumbleweed. I notice one of them is spamming my PiHole with DNS queries for conncheck.opensuse.org. I first noticed it when I was getting rate limit warnings in PiHole (> 1,000 queries a minute). These were all (mostly) to conncheck.opensuse.org. I’ve rebooted the machine, ran zypper dup I’m not sure why this machine is doing this.

I’ve done some research and seems this is how NetworkManager verifies it has internet connectivity? Seems a bit excessive, and none of my other machines are doing this as frequently. I did find a link (conncheck.opensuse.org - #2 by tannington) that seems to indicate how I can disable it. I haven’t tried that yet because I’d rather try and fix it before just disabling it.

Any help or understanding in to why conncheck.opensuse.org is being queried by one of my openSUSE machines > 1,000 times a minute in some instances would be helpful. Again I have two bare metal boxes, and a couple VM’s on other boxes all running some form of openSUSE (Leap / Tumbleweed) and none of them are behaving badly like this.

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Another post from long ago

See Post#2 from @malcolmlewis … might be a new bug

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Yes I saw that one, I also found a way to disable network checking (I linked to it) and I did the change and it seems to fix. However, the symptom of one machine querying conncheck.opensuse.org > 1,000 times a minute on the regular seems like something is wrong. I’d love to be able to troubleshoot it, but since I would like to eliminate the excess traffic I’ve just applied the fix (disabling checks all together). Since I have several Tumbleweed (and a leap or two) install running and this one machine is the only one that does it I was hoping to “figure it out”, but “stopping it” is a close second and right now I count the win.

If anyone has any additional info on why it might be checking so often I’d love to hear.

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Yep … personal opinion here - I DO NOT want a distro “pinging back”. It’ll be obvious if my network connection is not working.

The “network manager”, whatever it is, should ONLY worry about connecting to my WIFI or ethernet … tell me if that isn’t working , don’t worry about access to the Internet.

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Then find out what does it or why. NetworkManager is using default interval of 300 seconds.

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Yes, that’s why I’m here. I couldn’t find anything to help me troubleshoot why it is doing this - and I do agree this is quite excessive and abnormal as none of my other openSUSE installs have this behavior. The only thing I could find was that link I posted above that shows how to stop the checks all-together. If you have something more to add I am all ears (or eyes).

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You need to check if you have a custom conf file where you changed the connectivity section (interval).

https://networkmanager.dev/docs/api/latest/NetworkManager.conf.html

The uri is defined in /usr/lib/NetworkManager/conf.d/conncheck-openSUSE.conf
But you also need to check all other mentioned locations for a conf file.

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There were no files in that folder before I made the custom file to disable checking. It was empty.

EDIT: I hastily replied, it was /etc/Network manager/conf.d that was empty. I will review the correct path and reply later. Thanks for the pointer.

EDIT #2: /usr/lib/NetworkManager/conf.d/conncheck-openSUSE.conf contains:

[connectivity]
uri=http://conncheck.opensuse.org

There were no other files in that folder and I don’t see anything about interval so I’m guessing this is box standard. I’ll dig deeper and report back when I’ve reviewed the docs you linked to.

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Start with finding out what doing this. Old but still relevant. This discussion also mentions some more recent tools.

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I always disable this connectivity check creating /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/90-privacy.conf with contents:

[connectivity]
interval=0

And restart NetworkManager with sudo systemctl restart NetworkManager.

If you are using IPv6 you should also ensure that NetworkManger uses random IPv6 addresses (instead of default MAC based addresses that will spill to whole Internet) by appending to same file:

[connection]
ipv6.ip6-privacy=2
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