DRAC - Gratuitous ARPs - Too frequent.

Hi

We have a problem with the frequency of GARPS flooding our DRAC VLAN's.

The following is from our network people and I was wondering if a solution might be forthcoming to answer the below.

thx,

John Bradshaw

From our networks people:

I have read the emails below which describe how a GARP is generated by a host to advertise itself on the local VLAN which is correct.

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Here is the email that the response above is referring to

A GARP is  generated whenever there are changes to the link that a host is connected to . The changes can be caused due to bad cabling, switches, switch\router configs etc. If you are not able to identify the cause, disable the GARP protocol at VLAN and test whether that makes a difference? It cannot be controlled at a host level(IDRAC). It has to be controlled at the network level

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From our networks people:

It then goes on to say that the issue we are having may be stopped at the network level by disabling GARP at the router/switch. This is not correct, as the GARPs we are seeing all come from the DRACs and not from the router/firewall interface. We could disable GARP on the router/firewall, however, this does not stop the hosts (DRACs) in the VLAN from generating the GARP.

 

We need to know why the DRAC is generating a GARP every few seconds and determine if this is causing any issue with DRACs performance.

 

Further to this we have done testing whereby we connected a Laptop, with WireShark, directly to the CMC1 port (CMC2 was disconnected)

From the WireShark capture attached, we can see that the DRAC’s are generating the GARPs themselves without even a connection to the network. If we follow one Ethernet conversation in the capture, the frequency is actually every one second!

As mentioned before, we suspect that these excessive numbers of broadcasts may be overwhelming the DRACs as they have to look at all broadcasts. This may explain the slow response of the DRAC web interface.

 

So we need to be sure that this cannot be modified at the DRAC level.

Is there a tool to modify the GARP intervals or disable them?

Thx,

John Bradshaw