Tuesday, January 5, 2021

Port errors accumulating during network boot

I've noticed over the years of my career that when a server or a switch is in auto-provisioning mode (PXE/ZTP etc) in it's reboot loop that switchport errors will sometimes start incrementing. The number is very high, way higher then you'd expect from the number of packets being sent out during the network boot attempt.

Observations: It only happens sometimes. i.e. you can have two servers that are in network boot mode and one interface will increment errors, whereas a different one will not.

It doesn't matter if it's a server or a switch.

When the switch/server is finally provisioned the errors no longer increment and everything is fine.
I've only ever seen it on arista switches as the ToRs, but that is only because the companies I've worked at use Arista. No idea if it happens on others.

So the question is, what is causing those errors?

Note that this isn't a problem, but it does cause our port error monitoring to alert sometimes while we are provisioning new servers/switches and I'd like to have an explanation for whenever interested parties ask.



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