10.4: Prevent repetitive system.log entries from Fusion

Mar 07, '07 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: robg

Recently, while looking for something else in /var/log on my MacBook Pro, I happened to notice that the system log file was nearly 20MB in size -- yikes! By comparison, the log file on the Mac Pro was only 117KB. Clearly something was amiss. I opened Console, and found this in the system.log file:

...
Mar  6 19:35:47 tinisin kernel[0]: SMAC: FromHostIP: could not find IP 192.168.1.15 in lookup, so drop
Mar  6 19:35:48 tinisin kernel[0]: SMAC: FromHostIP: could not find IP 192.168.1.15 in lookup, so drop
Mar  6 19:35:49 tinisin kernel[0]: SMAC: FromHostIP: could not find IP 192.168.1.15 in lookup, so drop
...

Every second or so, that message appears...over and over and over. The IP address referenced is that of the same MacBook Pro, so I was really stumped. Off to the net, where I stumbled onto this thread at, of all places, the Ubuntu forums. It turns out that this problem is caused by the beta version of VMWare Fusion -- but only when connecting via AirPort. As posted in the referenced thread by Kalou, the solution involves a quick trip to Terminal:
/Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/vmnet-apps.sh stop
As soon as I ran that command, the log file entries stopped appearing. When I launched VMWare Fusion again, all seemed fine -- my virtual machine restored successfully, and I was able to surf the net via the wireless connection. Even better, after quitting Fusion, the log entries did not start up again. As best I can tell, the shell script is responsible for running a DHCP server for Fusion (but that's mostly a guess).

If you're using Fusion over AirPort, it might be worth a quick glance at your system.log file to see if you're experiencing the same thing.

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