All things related to multicast

[Toerless Eckert <>]

Michael, *: 

 a) If any of you have opened directly or indirectly a case with
    the TAC, please tell us. I have Cc'ed the developer as well so
    that we can take appropriate action.
 
 b) Without implying that it is the root cause for the problem seen,
    the new error message you see was introduced via a recent
    bugfix that tried to overcome an incompatibility of SAP
    with other new SAP messages ;-((((. 
    
    If you have a CCO password, you can look up the description of
    that issue at:

      
http://www.cisco.com/cgi-bin/Support/Bugtool/onebug.pl?bugid=CSCee92905&Submit=Search
  
 c) In general we recommend not to enable SAP, so i am very interested
    to get a reinforcement about how useful this command still is
    to common user practices ;-)) After all: 
    There is really nothing in SAP that you could not do better by 
    running SAP on a host system (PC, unix, linux,...).

    The router is just receiving these messages and you can display
    them with "show" commands. Nothing else. The forwarding of SAP,
    as already said by someone else on this thread is completely
    unaffected.

    The problem obviously is that because SAP on the router is used
    ONLY for such random "show" commands by few users, there is
    no real business incentive to follow all the newest developments
    into decoding new type of SAP messages, so the command also
    becomes less and less useful - and it was only of limited use
    in the beginning.
  
Thanks
    Toerless

On Thu, Mar 23, 2006 at 04:21:07PM -0000, Michael Forrest wrote:
> 
> Has anyone seen the following issue with Cisco router running ipv4
> multicast?
> 
> The log messages just seem to be full of the following msg:-
> 
> Mar 20 16:05:38 door.erg.abdn.ac.uk 299: *Mar 16 06:39:31.369 UTC:
> %MROUTE-6-UNSUPPORTED_SAP_FORMAT: Received unsupported format SAP message
> from (129.116.74.139)
> 
> The MFIB (multicast forwarding information base) seems to have a memory leak
> and eventually consumes all the memory available on the router. The router
> becomes inaccessible on the console and over the network and requires a
> power cycle to recover. Although strangely enough, still seems to be
> functional (if just unaccessible).
> 
> A show ver from the router yields (it's a Cisco 2621XM):-
> 
> Cisco IOS Software, C2600 Software (C2600-ADVENTERPRISEK9-M), Version
> 12.4(7), RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc6)
> Technical Support: http://www.cisco.com/techsupport
> Copyright (c) 1986-2006 by Cisco Systems, Inc.
> Compiled Tue 28-Feb-06 23:32 by alnguyen
> 
> Doing a show proc memory shows that it seems to consume about 1MB of memory
> every 4-5hours until the router just falls over.
> 
> All the unsupported SAP messages come from a cluster of machines with
> similar names to:-
> 
> vbrick-cma5136.communication.utexas.edu
> 
> Anyone had/solved this issue before?
> 
> -Michael
> 
> --
> Michael Forrest,
> Directorate of Information Systems and Services,
> University of Aberdeen.
> 
> Tel: +44-1224-273392

-- 
Thanks
   Toerless Eckert