Date: Wed, 10 May 2000 21:19:06 -0500 (EST) From: Jim Early <earlyjp@cs.purdue.edu> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: ssh exhausting swap space Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.10.10005102044090.6664-100000@lisa.cs.purdue.edu>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Greetings, I have a newly installed FreeBSD V4.0-RELEASE box that I'm using as a simple packet filter with network address translation. The machine is a 486SX with 16Mb of ram, 1Gb of disk space, and two 3Com ethernet interfaces. I have set up a swap partition of 37Mb. Granted, it's a dinosaur, but it's doing the job just fine. However, I have one problem. Whenever I ssh into this machine, or try to ssh from this machine out to another machine, ssh just keeps consuming memory until all the swap space is exhausted, at which time the ssh process is killed. The gateway stays up, and everything else works fine - I only have a problem when I try to use ssh (or access through sshd). I've made a log of one such outbound session - I'm trying to ssh from my gateway to another machine on my subnet. Here is the debug output: bash# ssh -v 192.168.0.2 SSH Version OpenSSH-1.2.2, protocol version 1.5. Compiled with SSL. debug: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh/ssh_config debug: ssh_connect: getuid 0 geteuid 0 anon 0 debug: Connecting to 192.168.0.2 [192.168.0.2] port 22. debug: Allocated local port 1021. debug: Connection established. debug: Remote protocol version 1.5, remote software version 1.2.27 debug: Waiting for server public key. debug: Received server public key (768 bits) and host key (1024 bits). debug: Host '192.168.0.2' is known and matches the host key. /* We've taken about 3 seconds to get to this point, but now the process just sits until I start getting "no swap space messages" on the gateway console */ Killed As I said, I know this machine is a lightweight, but I think it's suitable for the job (previously, it had been running in the same capacity under FreeBSD 2.2.5 for about a year). I also don't believe that increasing the swap space is the answer. During normal operation, if I check "top", I rarely see the free memory drop below 7 Megs. I almost never see swap space being used, either. Right now, the machine is running only natd, sshd, cron, sh, getty, ident2, portmap, and adjkerntz. The remaining 44+ Mb of free memory should certainly be enough to run an ssh session. Besides, if I did add more swap, I think it would just get used up, too. I've searched through the handbook, mail archives, and newsgroup archives, and man pages but I can't find any mention of this particular problem. There are tales of swap space being exhausted while using a large program like Netscape, but no mention of ssh. If anyone has some suggestions for how to resolve this problem, it would most appreciated. Also, please reply directly to me at earlyjp@cs.purdue.edu as I am not on the mailing list right now. Thanks for your assistance. Jim Early To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?Pine.GSO.4.10.10005102044090.6664-100000>