Procurve 'Unknown Protos' counter

[IJdo Dijkstra]

On quite a few of our ports were see largish numbers reported in the 'Unknown Protos' counter (show interface). Does anybody know what this counter shows exactly?

(54xx chassis running 13.09)

[SCOOTER · Accepted solution]

That is the number of packets received via the interface which were discarded because of an unknown or unsupported protocol. I believe this is fixed in a later version of the software.

[SCOOTER]

More info in rfc2233 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2233

The part I was referring to that was fixed is the unnecessarily increment, even on down ports.

[IJdo Dijkstra]

That much I gathered, the info about a bug in that area was useful. We're considering another upgrade round soon-ish anyway.

That said, I'm still not too sure what would make this counter increase. Unknown protos would imply that the frames and/or packets do make sense at some level, so I would assume them to be properly handled at the level they still make sense, not dropped.