annoying dhclient error messages

[Lowell Gilbert]

Christopher Illies <christopher.illies at molmed.ki.se> writes:

> I recently installed FreeBSD 5.3 on my desktop at work. DHCP was
> configured with sysinstall (/etc/rc.conf: ifconfig_fxp0="DHCP"), and
> /etc/dhclient.conf is empty. In fact I do have a good network
> connection. The problem is that I get the following annoying error
> messages about every two to five minutes:
> 
> Nov 13 13:43:59 Klabautermann dhclient: slp-directory-agent: 4 extra
> bytes at end of array
> Nov 13 13:43:59 Klabautermann last message repeated 2 times
> Nov 13 13:43:59 Klabautermann dhclient: parse_option_param: Bad format
> a
> Nov 13 13:46:26 Klabautermann dhclient: slp-directory-agent: 4 extra
> bytes at end of array
> Nov 13 13:46:26 Klabautermann last message repeated 2 times
> Nov 13 13:46:26 Klabautermann dhclient: parse_option_param: Bad format
> a
> 
> These messages are more a nuisance than anything else, still I would
> like to get rid of them. I updated the system last week (tag=RELENG_5),
> but that did not help. Interestingly, I do not see these messages when
> running Debian GNU/Linux on the very same computer. Google did not
> reveal anything helpful.

This really does look like the server is sending out some bad
parameters.  Probably you were using a different DHCP client on Linux.

I'd suggest just changing the syslog configuration to filter those
into a new log file, and block them from the console.  Remember to
check the file once in a while.