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From: newton@cleese.apana.org.au (Mark Newton)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.bugs,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Network hangs on diskless FreeBSD system
Date: 16 May 1995 15:39:00 +0930
Organization: cleese.apana.org.au public access UNIX +61-8-3736006
Lines: 86
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <3p9fhs$25o@cleese.apana.org.au>
NNTP-Posting-Host: cleese.apana.org.au
I have a 386DX/40 FreeBSD 2.0 system running as a router. The machine
is diskless, and uses my main server host (running the same version of
FreeBSD) as a boot server. The diskless box is called "dotat", the server
is called "cleese".
dotat is very small (read: cheap). It has a slow CPU, no disks, no monitor,
no keyboard, and only 5Mb of RAM. Essentially, it's a small, unobtrusive
box which sits up on one end of my modem rack without bothering anyone :-)
I quite frequently find that dotat stops serving incoming TCP connections.
If I attempt to telnet to it, I get messages such as:
newton@cleese> telnet dotat
Trying 203.14.159.1...
Connected to dotat.apana.org.au.
Escape character is '^]'.
_
... and no further activity.
dotat obviously hasn't completely hung -- it still functions perfectly
well as a router, I can ping it, and (as far as I know), it's still
running processes (I can't login to it though, so I can't verify that :-/)
Suspicion: NFS is becoming spagged. Since system is swapping over NFS,
syslog is unable to page-in to tell me about it. So, the system just
silently falls over. inetd probably doesn't need to page to accept a
connection, so dotat continues to accept them, but any servers forked
off by inetd require paging I/O so nothing ever happens after the
acceptance of the connection. Routing is unaffected because that's all
happening in the kernel, which never pages anyway.
Has this problem been seen before? Does the latest SNAP fix it?
FYI:
dotat's dmesg:
newton@dotat> dmesg
FreeBSD 2.1.0-Development #0: Sat May 6 20:13:37 CST 1995
root@cleese.apana.org.au:/usr/src/sys/compile/DOTAT
CPU: i386DX (386-class CPU)
real memory = 4849664 (1184 pages)
avail memory = 3940352 (962 pages)
Probing for devices on the ISA bus:
scprobe: keyboard RESET failed fe
sc0 at 0x60-0x6f irq 1 on motherboard
sc0: MDA/hercules <16 virtual consoles, flags=0x0>
ed0 at 0x300-0x31f irq 10 on isa
ed0: address 00:00:21:40:97:73, type NE2000 (16 bit)
sio0 at 0x3f8-0x3ff irq 4 on isa
sio0: type 16550A
sio1 at 0x2f8-0x2ff irq 3 on isa
sio1: type 16550A
sio2 not found at 0x1b0
sio3 not found at 0x1b8
pca0 PC speaker audio driver
npx0 on motherboard
npx0: 387 emulator
NFS SWAP: 203.0.12.134:/local4/export/swap/dotat
using 20000 kbyte.
NFS ROOT: 203.0.12.134:/local4/export/root/dotat
Config file from /tftpboot on cleese, plus other info:
root@cleese> cat /tftpboot/cfg.203.0.12.135
hostname dotat.apana.org.au
rootfs 203.0.12.134:/local4/export/root/dotat
swapfs 203.0.12.134:/local4/export/swap/dotat
swapsize 20000
root@cleese> ls -l /local4/export/swap/dotat
total 40050
drwxrwxr-x 2 root wheel 512 Apr 30 18:24 ./
drwxrwxr-x 3 root wheel 512 Apr 30 18:38 ../
-rw-r--r-T 1 root wheel 20480000 May 16 15:35 swap.203.0.12.135
root@cleese>
- mark
--
--------------------------------------------------------------------
I tried an internal modem, newton@cleese.apana.org.au
but it hurt when I walked. Mark Newton
----- Voice: +61-8-3732429 --------------- Data: +61-8-3736006 -----