Originally posted by: mtailor

Hello.

On our all our AIX 5.x and 6.x servers, our syslog file just keeps filling up with ifconfig -a and /usr/sbin/ifconfig -a entries. Each of these entries is made every 5-minutes. Can someone educate me as what these are? Can they be turned off? Here's a sample.

Feb 24 11:26:10 appprd user:info syslog: /usr/sbin/ifconfig -a
Feb 24 11:26:18 appprd user:info syslog: ifconfig -a
Feb 24 11:31:09 appprd user:info syslog: /usr/sbin/ifconfig -a
Feb 24 11:31:17 appprd user:info syslog: ifconfig -a
Feb 24 11:36:10 appprd user:info syslog: /usr/sbin/ifconfig -a
Feb 24 11:36:17 appprd user:info syslog: ifconfig -a
Many thanks.

Mahesh
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Originally posted by: rlp8971

You probably should look at any cron jobs running on your system. Anytime someone runs "ifconfig -a" it will log to syslog (if you have user:info turned on). Since it is every five minutes, most likely something is being run from cron.

You can test this by running ifconfig and tailing your syslog file to see it in action.
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Originally posted by: mtailor

rlp8971:

Thanks for the reply. I have gone through all the cron entries for all users on the machine that I got the entries I posted on the forum from. Only two users have any active entries. None of the active (uncommented) entries run every 5-minutes. There are no at jobs either.

TIA

Mahesh
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Originally posted by: mtailor

One additional piece of information I just thought about: all our servers use Etherchannel (failover not aggregated). Could these messages be due to Etherchannel checking the link?
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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

any chance you are running Oracle CRS. It does this repeatedly for the VIP.
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Originally posted by: mtailor

Some of the servers are Oracle, while others are not.
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Originally posted by: iampattoiam

I have ifconfig entries for all interfaces every 30 seconds. They came from IBM Tivoli Monitoring. Here's a proctree of the culprit:
4194460 /app/itm/aix526/ux/bin/kcawd
11141438 /bin/ksh /app/itm/aix526/ux/bin/agentInstanceCommand.sh ux STATUS None
2949176 grep -w None
61997286 /bin/ksh /app/itm/bin/cinfo -R
60817458 /bin/ksh /app/itm/bin/cinfo -R
30146676 /bin/ksh /app/itm/bin/ITMhostName -n -a
51249240 /bin/ksh /app/itm/bin/ITMhostName -n -a
So the ITM unix agent, v6.22.02.
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Originally posted by: Ijalba

Hi,

 

I have also found our friend lpar2rrd monitoring software to issue "ifconfig -a" repeated times:

 

[root@aix72:/var/log]grep ifconfig /opt/lpar2rrd-agent/lpar2rrd-agent.pl

# enhance PATH environment, ifconfig on Linux can be in /sbin
  my $IFCONFIG = "ifconfig -a";
    $IFCONFIG = "ifconfig -a";
      $IFCONFIG = "ifconfig -a";
  my @ifconfig_a = "";
    @ifconfig_a = `$IFCONFIG 2>>$error_log`;
  while (my $line = shift @ifconfig_a) {
            $line = shift @ifconfig_a;
        $line = shift @ifconfig_a;

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