HSRP standby address not reachable

[slicerpro]

    Hi all, I have  my hsp setup where switch A and switch B share active/standby roles among several vlans. In the last few weeks, i have seen trouble tickets where connectivity is lost and upon investigation i discover that i can ping physical interface IP addresses for both standby and active devices but not the standby IP. I have also validated configurations and layer 2 paths and they haven't been broken.

What i end up doing is failover to the standby device and back and the problem clears, reachability is restored. My question is whether I am solving this the right way. If so, what is it that would cause the standby IP to not be reachable and how does my solution fix that? If not, please offer suggestions. N/B the switches are catalyst 6509's.

[mfurnival]

That sounds strange - a more common problem with HSRP is that both devices "go master" because they can't see each other (possibly due to a misconfiguration or cable break). Could it be that the VLAN is going down because there are no active ports? Though if that happened I would expect the real IP address to be unreachable too.

Can you post your configs and logs? Maybe setup HSRP debug and log to the logging buffer or syslog and wait for it to happen again.

[InayathUlla Sharieff]

Slicer,

As we dont know what was the status of HSRP on the devices its quite difficult to tell on fly of what might have caused this.

Did you had any STP issue during that time? Any high cpu?

Did you see any HSRP hellos expiring or missing on the logs?

Did the Standby address not reachable for all the vlans or specific vlan?

Regards

Inayath