SCTP ABORT with reason Assocation exceeded its max retry count in protocol violation

Question

Why am I getting this error?

SCTP Abort with reason Association retry count exceeded

Answer 1

It looks like that your association has been closed due to remote endpoint failure: either association retransmission counter reached 'Association.Max.Retrans' or there is no more active paths that can been used for data sending.

According to RFC 4960 chapter 8.1 the association should just move to closed state in this case and inform upper layer. RFC does not recommend sending ABORT chunk in this case, because you have communication issues anyway and it is unlikely that the ABORT chunk will be delivered. Looks like the SCTP implementation you using prefers to send ABORT anyway. Protocol violation is a bit strange cause to use in such situation - remote endpoint has not violated the specification, there is just communication issue. However it shouldn't cause any issues for you.

I would recommend to study your wireshark trace a bit further and see if you have any retransmission prior to this ABORT chunk (you can do it quite easily with wireshark filters). If you find retransmissions - you need to investigate why remote end is not responding (maybe it has restarted, or something like that). If you don't find any retransmissions, you probably need to start looking what remote end was sending to the local side just before ABORT chunk was generated. Maybe you can find some anomalies there.