DMIDECODE error?

[maclark7029]

Hello,

Every couple hours, I get this flush of errors on my console. Please see attached picture.

Can someone please explain what's happening.

Other than this, everything else seems normal.

Thanks,
Mike

• Supermicro X11SSL-CF
• Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1230 v5 @ 3.40GHz
• 1 X 16GB PC4-2133 ECC
• 10 X 8TB Seagate IronWolf ST8000VN004; Boot 8GB SATA SSD flash drive

 

[Samuel Tai]

Check your jails and plugins. There may be a cron job invoking dmidecode. However, this doesn't work in a jail, as /dev/mem isn't available in a jail.

 

[maclark7029]

Thank you for the response. It doesn't appear in crontab.

 

[Samuel Tai]

Not the system crontab. The crontabs inside the jails/plugins.

 

[maclark7029]

Yes, checked both and neither had entry for dmidecode.

 

[Samuel Tai]

Which jails and plugins do you have running?

 

[maclark7029]

Only one jail that is running Subsonic that I installed from the standalone package. I have no plugins.

 

[Samuel Tai]

Hmm. Have you looked at /var/log/console.log, and its rolled-over siblings /var/log/console.log.*.bz2 (for these, you'll need to run bzcat /var/log/console.*.bz2 | more to view their contents).

I'm starting to get concerned you may have a malicious process running. Dmidecode is used to scan hardware. Do you share out any datasets to the Internet, say via BitTorrent?

 

[Samuel Tai]

Sorry for the delay. This looks to be the output of debug.log. Do you have any debug alerts enabled? Also, are you running a debug kernel, or have configured "Show console messages" in System->Advanced?

 

[joeschmuck]

I'm just curious with a few questions... @maclark7029

1. What version of FreeNAS are you running?
2. Prior to these error messages, who long had the system been running without error?
3. Have you done any updates/upgrades to your system (within 60 days of noticing the error messages)?

So I'm asking these questions because often something we do causes the problem and it may not be noticeable immediately. If the system was previously working fine then maybe we could trace it back to an operator action. There have been DMIDECODE issues in previous versions of FreeNAS. I'm not saying it couldn't be a hacker or nefarious program but we should look at other things first.

Lastly, if you only have a minor setup of FreeNAS which you are basically indicating, you can perform a complete new clean install of FreeNAS, verify it works properly. If good then install Subsonic and test again. Pay attention to everything you are doing. Maybe when you install Subsonic you may find a reportable Bug issue. And if you wanted to retain your old boot drive, it's easy enough to use a USB Flash drive or just any drive to be a temporary boot device to this testing/troubleshooting. or you could do what I'd do, make a bckup of your configuration file and wipe the SSD Boot drive clean and start from scratch.

Good luck.

 

[maclark7029]

Stupid, stupid me... Months ago I was playing around with a program called "Lansweeper" and forgot that it was still running in the background on another computer on my network. It was set up to automatically SSH into my old server that was running a very old version of freenas (9.2) and collect its configuration using DMIDECODE. It was working just fine. I recently replaced the old server with new hardware and a much newer version of freenas (11.3-U2.1), and the passwords were not configured the same way as the old one server causing DMIDECODE to error.

Many thanks to Samuel. Your suggestion to look at the console.log led me to the solution. I saw that one of the computers on my network (the one running Lansweeper that I forgot about) was connecting to the server using SSH, which then immediately showed the DMIDECODE errors. Shut down Lansweeper and voila, no more errors.

Thanks again!

Mike

 

[Samuel Tai]

You're welcome. Glad that mystery's solved.