Suppress VMWare nic "change" logs

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1

Hi everyone,
I seem to be getting the following kinds of messages in my logs exactly every 6 hours from my VMWare ESXi 6.5 host:

ifDescr: Device vmnic0 at 01:00.0 ntg3 -> vmnic0
ifDescr: Device vmnic1 at 01:00.1 ntg3 -> vmnic1

Does anyone know why these are being listed, and how I can suppress them?
The server is not being rebooted, and from the message I can’t see what is changing and why it is significant enough to be logged.

Thanks

2

Hi,
I have the same problem, and it looks like it’s due to a difference between the discovery (running every 6 hours on my setup) and poller processes, specific to VMware OS.
As I undestand it, every 6 hours discovery will set ifDescr like Device vmnic0 at 01:00.0 ntg3.
Then, every polling time, poller will set ifDescr like vmnic0.

In the ports polling code (includes/polling/ports.inc.php) I found this bit of code that does the string pruning:
if ($device[‘os’] == ‘vmware’ && preg_match(‘/Device ([a-z0-9]+) at .*/’, $this_port[‘ifDescr’], $matches)) {
$this_port[‘ifDescr’] = $matches[1];
}

I added something very similar to the discovery code (includes/discovery/ports.inc.php), so that the discovery process does the same pruning before storing ifDescr. It seems to work well on my setup.

Now I need to make a bug report and learn how to send a patch :slight_smile:

3

You should submit your patch in git hub as a pull request. :grin:

4

I most certainly will :slight_smile: Just need to take the time to learn how do do that properly.

5

No worries you should just submit what you have and everyone will help.

6

Any progress of this modification?
I also get those log-entries and I did not really understand the fix.

Can you post your code here by any chance?

7

Not yet, sorry, been busy!

Here is the diff, relative to librenms home:

--- includes/discovery/ports.inc.php.2019-12-18-nm	2019-11-26 11:49:24.491167259 +0100
+++ includes/discovery/ports.inc.php	2019-12-18 10:20:45.748802227 +0100
@@ -48,6 +48,10 @@
 foreach ($port_stats as $ifIndex => $snmp_data) {
     $snmp_data['ifIndex'] = $ifIndex; // Store ifIndex in port entry
 
+    if ($device['os'] == 'vmware' && preg_match('/Device ([a-z0-9]+) at .*/', $snmp_data['ifDescr'], $matches)) {
+        $snmp_data['ifDescr'] = $matches[1];
+    }
+
     // Get port_id according to port_association_mode used for this device
     $port_id = get_port_id($ports_mapped, $snmp_data, $port_association_mode);
1 Like
8

Hi everyone, sorry for the very late reply, and thanks @skanx for the solution.
It didn’t quite work for me, as the os is listed as " VMware ESXi 6.5.0 (build 5969303) " in LibreNMS.
I changed the first line of your code to the following

if (strpos($device['os'],'vmware') !==false && preg_match('/Device ([a-z0-9]+) at .*/', $snmp_data['ifDescr'], $matches)) {

And this seems to have worked. Can the devs check if this is a good solution and if it can be implemented?