bootpd is filling up /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log

[Paul Neralich]

About 15 times a day, 5 lines, similar to those shown below, are appended to my syslog.log file. Why? Any help is appreciated.

("rocky" is an HP-UX server, release B.10.20, model 9000/803)

Oct 10 10:01:02 rocky bootpd[23793]: bootpd 2.2 #1.17.212.4: Mon May 20 18:45:42
GMT 1996
Oct 10 10:01:02 rocky bootpd[23793]: reading "/etc/dhcptab"
Oct 10 10:01:02 rocky bootpd[23793]: reading "/etc/bootptab"
Oct 10 10:01:02 rocky bootpd[23793]: read 2 entries from "/etc/bootptab"
Oct 10 10:16:02 rocky bootpd[23793]: Exiting after 15 minutes of inactivity

[harry d brown jr]

The verbosity of bootpd, if you don't need it, should be turned off, or lowered (the -d # option).

You could also change the logging file via /etc/syslog.conf to another file.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi Paul:

It simply means than your box 'rocky' is attempting to respond to bootp requests. That is, to assign DHCP ip addresses to PC or other client or to assign bootp addresses to devices like network printers. If you do not need this service or if these requests are actually handled by another server, you can simply disable the service.

edit /etc/inetd.conf and insert a '#' at the beginning of the line containing bootps. You then do an inetd -c to force a reconfiguration
and you are done.

Clay

[Rainer von Bongartz]

Paul,

very normal behaviour here. bootpd is started by inetd whenever a bootp request arrives. After serving this request bootpd waits 15 minutes for new request and then terminates .
If the next bootp request comes after 15 minutes inetd starts a new bootpd .

Regards
Rainer

[harry d brown jr]

You could set bootpd to run forever by adding the option "-t0", that way it doesn't exit after receiving a request. If you do do this, then if you make a bootptab change, you might have to "bounce" bootpd.

[Kevin Wright]

Most likely your not even using rocky as a bootptab server, if not, you should simply turn off the service in /etc/inetd.conf, comment it out, and hup inetd with inetd -c.