%EARL-3-SETVLANTIMER:Failure error message on 32meg 4003

[neil.mcguinness]

%EARL-3-SETVLANTIMER:Failure to set timer 15 from vlan 1

Has anyone have any idea what this error message means as it mentions to contact technical representative. The problem is that this switch is the core switch for a network with 3 x 2948g's hanging off short haul fibre uplinks and every so often one of the 2948g's will lose connectivity to the core 4003 switch. The workaround is to reboot the 2948G and connectivity to that switch is restored. The only error message I can see is the above error message on the core 4003.

[Prashanth Krishnappa]

What CAT OS are you running on the 2948G's and the 4003? The message on your CAT4003 means that the EARL was not able to set the CAM aging time for the VLAN to 15 seconds, which is "fast aging". The reason the EARL can't set the VLAN to fast aging is because the VLAN is already in fast aging, and aging timer set process is blocked. The default CAM aging time is five minutes, which means that the switch will flush its table of learned MAC addresses every five minutes. This ensures that the MAC address table (the CAM table) has current entries. Fast aging temporarily sets the CAM aging time to 15 seconds, and is used in conjunction with the Topology Change Notification (TCN) process. The idea is when a topology change is occurring, you want to flush the CAM table faster, to compensate for the topology change that is occurring. You can check the CAM aging time on your switch with "sh cam aging". TCNs and fast aging should be fairly rare. So if you see VLANs that are frequently in fast aging, then you'll probably want to find out why.

Also, there is a bug opened regarding this error message : CSCdm00652, which can be viewed at

which is integrated in 5.4(3) and later(but you cannot upgrade 32MB 4003 to this code).

[neil.mcguinness]

The 4003 is running 5.1(1a) CatOS with a bootstrap of 4.4.(1) The network is flat with everything configured to Vlan 1.We have reccomended to upgrade the memory and bootstrap/CatOS to a newer version.

The 2948G's are all running version 6.3(10) with a bootstrap of 6.1(4). Also will check out the bug above. Many Thanks

[Prashanth Krishnappa]

Bug might not be visible on CCO(internally found). You might want to consider running latest 6.4(x) on all your CAT4003 (after memory upgrade) and 2948Gs.

6.4(13) is the latest release in 6.x and it has lot of bug fixes and enhancements which assist in troubleshooting. Also, it is a General Deployment release