Apologies in advance if this is a question that’s been answered before – but I 
haven’t been able to find the question asked anywhere. If it’s in the list 
archives, double sorry....

My ntop 4.0.3 installation (data source, sflow on Force10 C300 switch) 
permanently reads ~65% non-IP traffic. Regardless, it seems to paint a very 
accurate picture of our network traffic as I imagine it to be, just the right 
amount of memcache, nfs, mysql, etc. All the individual servers, likewise, note 
around the same amount of non-IP traffic.

Currently, it’s been running an hour or two, total traffic = 4.5GB, IP traffic 
= 1.6GB, non-IP traffic 2.9GB. ARP and STP between them add up to around 5MB.

Running tcpdump randomly on my network shows next to zero non IP traffic, 99% 
of which is ARP anyhow. We run busy websites here, and there’s a LOT of tcp 
traffic on the network. I sort of assume that somehow I might have noticed an 
EVEN HUGER volume of non-IP traffic on my switch, but maybe not. But if it’s 
there, I don’t have clue either what it is or where it’s going.

Can anyone tell me if there’s a simple explanation for an ntop installation to 
mistakenly identify IP traffic as not IP, perhaps due to network or cpu load?

Or, can anyone tell me how sflow categorizes a packet as non-IP, so I can trawl 
through all the packets coming into 6343 on the monitoring machine to see which 
packets are being marked as non-IP? Obviously, all  the sflow packets hitting 
the machine are UDP/IP, but once past the IP header, how is the sflow part of 
the packet structured, and how/where does it categorize the packet as non-IP? 
Presumably the sflow sender packs up the individual packet it’s sampled into 
one or more sflow packets, but here I’m just guessing.

Also, I see this in the log, though less with 4.0.3 than I did with 4.0:
Mon Nov  1 14:44:17 2010  **WARNING** packet truncated (8754->8232)
Mon Nov  1 14:44:17 2010  **WARNING** packet truncated (8754->8232)
Mon Nov  1 14:44:17 2010  **WARNING** packet truncated (8754->8232)
It’s not always 8754, sometimes 12450, 9698 or higher, but it’s always 8232.

That makes no sense to me either, as all the sflow packets are IP packets of 
around 1500 or less. Probably unrelated and maybe a bug based on the reading 
I’ve done?

Oh and I found a couple of ntop installations open on the internet: both of 
them registered > 50% non-IP traffic too. Not a valid sample, of course.

Any help would be much appreciated,

Barnaby

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