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Date: Mon, 24 Feb 1997 10:09:34 -0500 (EST)
From: Jim Riffle <jriffle@nix.kconline.com>
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To: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com>
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Subject: Re: Recurring freeze with 2.1.5 system
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On Sun, 23 Feb 1997, Jake Hamby wrote:

> There's a 486 system at my Internet provider that he's set up as a "geek 
> box" for people to hack on.  It's a fairly lame configuration (486DX/4 
> 100MHz, 8MB RAM, IDE drives, NE2000 card).  Anyway, it has a recurring 
> problem where it will only answer pings.  Logins, either remote or from the 
> console, will hang (telnet will connect, but not prompt for username), and 
> the system must be forcibly rebooted.
> 
> We think it may be a hardware problem, perhaps bad RAM.  I'm just curious if 
> there are any known bugs in 2.1.5-RELEASE which might cause this.  The 
> systems are similar to a SYN attack, except for the frozen local login.  
> We're going to upgrade it to 2.2-GAMMA next weekend, and hopefully the 
> problems will go away.  If not, can we safely conclude that it is a problem 
> of buggy hardware?

I ran into a very similar problem to this some time ago.  I am not sure if
this is your problem, but it would definatly be worth tring before
swapping out your hardware.

Add these 2 lines into you kernel config file (you can change the 256 to
anything you like)

options         "CHILD_MAX=256"
options         "OPEN_MAX=256"


I belive the default is 64.

My symptoms were similar to where the machine would respond to pings, but
would not start anything new.  no logins, no web.  Name server would
continue to function.  Basically anything running would still run as long
as it didn't have to open any files.

Jim