Smarts SAM: Traps forwarded from other management systems to Smarts are being discarded and associated notifications are not being shown in the Smarts SAM Notification Console

Products

• VMware

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:




Traps forwarded from other management systems to Smarts are being discarded and associated notifications are not being shown in the Smarts SAM Notification Console
Traps forwarded to Smarts from other management systems are intermittently not being displayed in the Smarts SAM Notification Console

Traps forwarded to Smarts from other management systems are not being logged in the Smarts SAM log file
 

Time of dropped traps coincides with the following error in the Smarts trapd log:

[01-Feb-2010 10:48:18+459ms UTC] t@1090533728 SNMP_TrapsHandler [212.23.36.146:1
62] Receiver
CI-W-EWHILE-While executing function "receivePacket"; in file
   "/work/bluecurrent/FOUNDATION-7.2.0.X/74/smarts/snmp/lib/SNMP_Receiver.c"
   at line 137
NX-BLOCK-Operation on socket would block; in file
   "/work/bluecurrent/FOUNDATION-7.2.0.X/73/smarts/clsapi/network/lib/NX_Sock
   et.c" at line 237

 

With --traceSNMP flag set, the following is seen in the log file after the Trap Adapter:

...
   34:      error-index ->
            INTEGER-32 (0x02), 1 byte == 0
   37:      VarBindList ->
            INTEGER-32 (0x02), 2 bytes ==    39:      VarBind -> TIME-TICKS (0x43), 4 bytes ==    41:      SEQUENCE (0x30), 144 bytes:
".1.3.6.1.4.1.4748.1.1.1.3.0"
  188:        SEQUENCE (0x30), 16 bytes:
<Null>
   68:      Remainder of the bad packet follows.
{      30, 14, 06, 0c, 2b, 06, 01, 04, 01, a5, 0c, 01, 03, 01, 01, 00,
       02, 04, 01, d1, 7d, 13, 30, 41, 06, 0c, 2b, 06, 01, 04, 01, a5,
       0c, 01, 03, 01, 02, 00, 04, 31, 34, 34, 38, 35, 33, 20, 31, 30,
       2f, 30, 32, 2f, 31, 32, 20, 31, 39, 3a, 30, 35, 3a, 30, 39, 20,
       34, 30, 39, 37, 20, 41, 20, 54, 53, 43, 20, 4e, 4f, 54, 20, 52,
       45, 53, 50, 4f, 4e, 44, 49, 4e, 47, 30, 0f, 06, 0a, 2b, 06, 01,
       04, 01, a5, 0c, 01, 1c, 00, 02, 01, 01, 30, 12, 06, 0a, 2b, 06,
       01, 04, 01, a5, 0c, 01, 1d, 00, 02, 04, 01, d1, 7d, 11     }
[12-Feb-2010 19:05:13+793ms UTC] t@1092634976 SNMP_TrapsHandler [212.23.36.146:162] Processor SNM2-E-SNMP_AGENTERRORSTATS-Below message for SNMP agent at
    '10.44.1.190:40852', was suppressed 0 times since The Epoch  SNMP-EPARSER-Mangled or incorrect packet; parsing aborted and data discarded;
    in file
    "/work/bluecurrent/FOUNDATION-7.2.0.X/74/smarts/snmp/lib/SNMP_Parser.c" at
    line 1248
...

Environment

VMware Smart Assurance - SMARTS

Cause

The wrong information being returned by the device. The "SNMP-EPARSER-Mangled or incorrect packet" message in the above problem symptom ("With --traceSNMP flag set...") indicates that this issue is caused by a parser error resulting from a bad packet. Therefore, Smarts cannot parse the packet further because it is corrupted or does not follow the RFC standards.

Resolution

This issue must be resolved with the vendor of the problem device (see Note statement).

Additional Information

There are no system consequences associated these "bad" traps being dropped. Even if some traps with respect to the device are dropped (such as Card Down and Card Up), Smarts will poll for the status in next polling cycle and the status will get updated accordingly. Also, when one of these erroneous traps is discarded, Smarts does NOT drop other traps.