SLP Discrepancies

Articles and Tips: qna

01 Oct 2002

As I've been looking over the services that are showing up under Service Location Protocol (SLP), I've been confused by some of the entries. In particular, I'm looking at services that are showing up when I do a DISPLAY SLP SERVICES on the server console, compared to what is showing up within the SCOPE unit in eDirectory. Is there some time difference between what is stored in eDirectory and what is actually out there? What got me thinking about this was some objects that I had (until I unloaded SCMD) on the console displayed as service:sapsrv.novell:ipx and in NWAdmin and ConsoleOne as sapserv_novell_ < internal IPX number of whatever server has this particular service >:<tons of 0s and a 1>:< whatever service in hex notation >.

I have multiple questions related to these entries. However, the one I'm currently focusing on is this. Since I unloaded SCMD from all the servers, the console display SLP services no longer shows them; however, within eDirectory they are still there and have been for several hours now.

My initial understanding was that the eDirectory entries and the information on the Directory Agent (DA) were the same and were dynamically created and deleted as the services came and went. That does not appear to be the case. Right now the servers (all of them) think that there are 59 services, while eDirectory thinks there are 72. Is this normal or should I be trying to track down some other configuration errors?

Sandy the SLPer

Dear Sandy: SLP DAs maintain a cache which is flushed only once per day, so give it some time. If you're really that anxious, you can just delete what's in the SLP container, but that's likely to upset something.

* Originally published in Novell AppNotes

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