Our site has approximately 50,000 ports on HP procurve equipment,
including about one hundred 5400zl/8200zl/3500yl switches ranging from K.12 to
latest K.14.65. About 40 have premium licenses and are doing routing.
Two such devices which are doing routing (a 6200yl-24G K.13.71 and a 5406zl K.13.71)
give this error, each, twice per day (exactly):
00901 IpAddrMgr: Failed to allocate new Arp Cache Mac Hash Pointer entry
These devices are providing routing for main campus wired captive portal ports,
and student residence wireless. At any given time, they may be providing routing
for up to 5,000 IP addresses, and over the course of several days, they may each
see well over 10,000 MAC addresses (but not at the same time). Usually after
the error shows up, we will get complaints from users that they cannot roam
to a different area. A "clear arp" on the switch, or a reboot, will cure it, temporarily.
We had a series of cases open for one device (when it was providing routing for
main campus wireless also), and tried numerous versions of firmware, some of which resulted in
hard crashes requiring manual intervention. We eventually gave up troubleshooting,
and moved main campus wireless to a Juniper SRX device.
But the error remains, and there are occasional reports of roaming issues,
and clearing the arp temporarily cures it.
Has anyone seen this ? Is moving to K.14.65 recommended ?