ITEM: AH6947L

bootp can't find hardware address message

Question:

Desc:
Bootp keeps displaying messages on the screen that say can't
find hardware address on the network.  Is this configured somewhere
on the RISC?

Resp:
No, this is not configured anywhere.  

Response:

   Env: AIX 3.2.5  Terminal Server, PC's, and Bootp printers

   Desc: Customer was receiving error messages similar
         to the following on their console:

        bootpd[pid]:  hardware address not found:  \

        The messages would scroll across the console about every
        5-15 minutes the entire day long.

   Action: Verified that bootp was starting from inetd, and
            was not in debug mode.

           Searched through the databases and
           located an item stating that the temporary fix for this
           situation is to add entries to the /etc/bootptab file
           in the following format:

           dummy2:ha=xxxxxxxxxxxx:

           for each of the hardware addresses that are causing the 
           error.

           Additional research showed that bootpd does use syslog. 
           This is not well documented, however, and bootpd
           will send out messages for spurious boot requests.  These are
           normally suppressed--UNLESS there is a specific request for
           these in /etc/syslog.conf.

           I believe that there is an entry in the /etc/syslog/conf
           file for the console that is causing the debug or daemon
           notify information.

           To verify this, I placed the following line in my 
           /etc/syslog.conf file and rebooted my RS/6000.  The 
           hardware address errors did appear when I setup an 
           unknown xstation to broadcast bootp.

           *.debug              /dev/console

   Next Action: I called Martha and left her a message concerning the
        above information.



Support Line: bootp can't find hardware address message ITEM: AH6947L

Dated: April 1995 Category: N/A

This HTML file was generated 99/06/24~13:30:27

Comments or suggestions?
Contact us