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Nik's avatar
Nik
Icon for Cirrus rankCirrus
Nov 08, 2013

ghost interfaces?

We had three interfaces "show up" during a hotfix.. they don't physically exist on the device and i have no idea how to get rid of them. From the web UI they're listed as having no mac address:

 UNINITIALIZED   1/2.1   0:0:0:0:0:0     Not Available   0  
 UNINITIALIZED   1/2.2   0:0:0:0:0:0     Not Available   0  
 UNINITIALIZED   1/2.8   0:0:0:0:0:0     Not Available   0

when running 

show net interface
i see this:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Net::Interface
Name    Status    Bits    Bits    Pkts    Pkts  Drops  Errs       Media
                    In     Out      In     Out                         
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
1/1.1       up  152.1T  252.7T   81.3G   97.1G  91.9K     0  10000SR-FD
1/1.2       up  250.9T  150.0T   98.2G   82.1G  23.7K     0  10000SR-FD
1/1.3     down       0       0       0       0      0     0        none
1/1.4       up   51.7G  531.4G   82.3M  128.6M      5     0  10000SR-FD
1/1.5     miss       0       0       0       0      0     0        none
1/1.6     miss       0       0       0       0      0     0        none
1/1.7     miss       0       0       0       0      0     0        none
1/1.8       up  101.0G  156.8G  107.3M  123.7M    159     0  10000SR-FD
1/2.1     pend       0       0       0       0      0     0        none
1/2.2     pend       0       0       0       0      0     0        none
1/2.8     pend       0       0       0       0      0     0        none
1/mgmt      up  753.7G   10.7G  783.3M    4.8M      0     0    100TX-FD
2/1.1     miss       0       0       0       0      0     0        none
2/1.2     miss       0       0       0       0      0     0        none
2/1.3     miss       0       0       0       0      0     0        none
2/1.4     miss       0       0       0       0      0     0        none
2/1.5     miss       0       0       0       0      0     0        none
2/1.6     miss       0       0       0       0      0     0        none
2/1.7     miss       0       0       0       0      0     0        none
2/1.8     miss       0       0       0       0      0     0        none
2/mgmt      up   82.3G    5.5M   82.8M      28      0     0    100TX-FD

This is a viprion 2400 chassis with two blades. As you can see ports 1.1-1.8 are my standard ports, which exist on both blades, however ports 2.1/2.2/2.8 are a mystery to me. There are two chassis and the behavior only exists on one of them.

They don't seem to be hurting anything right now and support has told us to disable the interfaces and call it a day however I want to know the "what & why" here.. any ideas?

availability
management
TMSH

1 Reply

  • Valentin_Z__956's avatar
    Valentin_Z__956
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Jan 15, 2017

    Hi everyone, I had a similar issue last week, where as I momentarily installed a blade into slot 4 and removed it having to end up with "ghost interfaces" showing up.

     

    4/1.1 miss 0 0 0 0 0 0 none 4/1.2 miss 0 0 0 0 0 0 none 4/1.3 miss 0 0 0 0 0 0 none 4/1.4 miss 0 0 0 0 0 0 none 4/1.5 miss 0 0 0 0 0 0 none 4/1.6 miss 0 0 0 0 0 0 none 4/1.7 miss 0 0 0 0 0 0 none 4/1.8 miss 0 0 0 0 0 0 none 4/1.9 miss 0 0 0 0 0 0 none 4/1.10 miss 0 0 0 0 0 0 none 4/1.11 miss 0 0 0 0 0 0 none 4/1.12 miss 0 0 0 0 0 0 none 4/1.13 miss 0 0 0 0 0 0 none 4/1.14 miss 0 0 0 0 0 0 none 4/1.15 miss 0 0 0 0 0 0 none 4/1.16 miss 0 0 0 0 0 0 none 4/2.1 miss 0 0 0 0 0 0 none 4/2.2 miss 0 0 0 0 0 0 none 4/2.3 miss 0 0 0 0 0 0 none 4/2.4 miss 0 0 0 0 0 0 none 4/mgmt miss 0 0 0 0 0 0 none

     

    I then noticed that interfaces belonging to this blade were still showing in the bigip_base.conf file and tried editing this to completely remove them, also tried disabling the blade. -< Nothing helped tried to reboot blade/chassis hoping that might fix things, and failed again. I was left w/ no other choice but to contact the F5 support which gave me the following answer: "The reason the interfaces display is a design feature. " Obviously that is not a what i needed to hear, as the customer and I explicitly didn't want to see interfaces which don't exit as part of the config and can cause future confusion. After insisting on this I was given the following working explanation/solution:

     

    If mcpd sees a blade plugged into a slot, it remembers it in memory. Mcpd also saves it's memory config to an XML file, so that when you reboot, mcpd can quickly load it's config, so it boots quicker. This is why when you rebooted before, you could still see the phantom interfaces. By running:-

     

    touch /service/mcpd/forceload

    before we rebooted, forces mcpd to load it's config from the config files, which is why this resolved your issue. note: that is to be applied after manually editing the bigip_base.conf file and modifying what needs to.

     

    Hope this helps anyone in the near future, since i was unable to find any thing related to this issue here on devcentral.

     

    Regards, V.Z