Comware

We have 18 switches of various models in our LAN, 5308xl, 2424, 2650, 4000M, and on every one of these switches in the event log I see the following error: invalid arp address 0.0.0.0 on w.x.y.z where the wxyz is the address of the switch itself. There will be 5 to 8 of these messages in a row and they occur about every 15-20 mins. all day every day. I have seen others ask about these errors without receiving any real answer. Could someone please provide a solid reason and hopefully a solution to these errors. We have no port trunking, no switch messhing, no DHCP relay agent on any of these switches. Please help.

Follow up to my question: In doing further investigating on this matter I noticed that all of the HP Jetdirects that we have on our network have a configuration for syslog-server and it is set to 0.0.0.0, we don't have a syslog server and I'm wondering could these jetdirects be arping as a result of this setting? If so is there a way to disable it?

Hi Anthony,

My understanding of this error is that something on the network is ARP'ing out with 0.0.0.0 as the source address. Quite often this can be a bootp/DHCP device trying to get an address.

What I would do is run ethereal and perform a filter on ARP, once you see those 0.0.0.0 addresses, find the mac-address and track down the device that's causing it.

Matt.

I would think that it is possible for a device configured to log to a syslog server, with the server address set to 0.0.0.0 could, theoretically, arp to find the MAC address to match - however this would indicate a flaw in the firmware/software of that device, since 0.0.0.0 should never be considered a local address, and it should then attempt to send the log data to the default gateway.

To my way of thought, it should also not be possible to enable logging without setting a valid ip address for the log server.

I want to suggest another possibility - do you have a dfault gateway configured on those switches? Or is that also set for 0.0.0.0 - this might be the reason that the error message points back to the switch address.