On 25/02/13 18:44, Stephen Isard wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Feb 2013 18:20:58 +0100, David Sommerseth
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
>> On 23/02/13 19:08, Stephen Isard wrote:
>>> A strange item turned up in my logs yesterday:
>>>
>>> kernel: process `grep' is using deprecated sysctl (syscall)
>>> net.ipv6.neigh.default.retrans_time; Use
>>> net.ipv6.neigh.default.retrans_t ime_ms instead.
> <snip>
>> I managed to trigger this one on a Fedora installation too.  I guess
>> someone did grep for something inside /proc ...
>>
>>  $ grep 0 /proc/sys/net/ipv6/neigh/default/retrans_time
>>  $ dmesg | tail -n1
>>  [61022.270399] process `grep' is using deprecated sysctl (syscall)
> net.ipv6.neigh.default.retrans_time; Use
> net.ipv6.neigh.default.retrans_time_ms instead.
>>
>> It's not caused by 'grep' itself, but as 'grep' was looking at a sysctl
>> parameter which is now deprecated - this triggered the warning you saw.
> 
> Hmm.  There was no other user on the machine at the time (I hope!  No trace
> of one in the logs anyway)  and I certainly didn't look at that /proc file
> myself from the command line.  I guess it's possible that the spurious usb
> event somehow led to a grep call.

What about cron/at jobs?  Or some other tasks running which would run some
grep calls?

In the meantime, I double checked ... 

   $ cat /proc/sys/net/ipv6/neigh/default/retrans_time
   $ awk '{print $0}' < /proc/sys/net/ipv6/neigh/default/retrans_time
   $ dmesg | tail -n2
   process `cat' is using deprecated sysctl (syscall) net.ipv6.neigh.default.retrans_time; Use net.ipv6.neigh.default.retrans_time_ms instead.
   process `awk' is using deprecated sysctl (syscall) net.ipv6.neigh.default.retrans_time; Use net.ipv6.neigh.default.retrans_time_ms instead.

So, as you see ... now the kernel complains about 'cat' and 'awk' accessing
the deprecated syscall.  I feel very confident you had something which
did run grep again that file inside /proc/sys/net/ipv6.... So you need to
check against /var/log/messages to see if you can find out what else
happened at the time when this log line was logged.


David S.