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Date:      Mon, 8 Apr 1996 05:50:33 -0400 (EDT)
From:      hoek@freenet.hamilton.on.ca
To:        Andrew Foster <adf@cafu.fl.net.au>
Cc:        freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.org, Rob Wise <cinder@cafu.fl.net.au>
Subject:   Re: Machines locking
Message-ID:  <Pine.SOL.3.91.960408053120.12168A-100000@james.freenet.hamilton.on.ca>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.91.960408121643.13249A-100000@cafu.fl.net.au>

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On Mon, 8 Apr 1996, Andrew Foster wrote:

> -  pings return
> -  some programs will still work via opening a socket (e.g. telnetting to
> port 80 will sometimes work, but not always)
> -  I can telnet in (no connection refused) but nothing will happen
> -  I can switch vtys at the console
> -  Pressing enter at the console login prompt will redisplay the banner
> -  Entering a username and pressing enter will do nothing - the machine just
> sits there
> -  The only way to fix it is to press reset
> -  My syslog.conf mentions a file which doesn't exist - as a result when I
> press C-A-D I see a syslogd error - so the machine tries to respawn
> something (this is my guess) but can't.

	I can cause the exact same thing to occur on my machine
(2.1-Release), right up to (and including) the syslogd error complaining
about the /var/log/lpd-errs file I rm'd but never got around to replacing
(although, I've never had the opportunity to try pinging my machine when
it's locked like this) by logging onto 4 vtys at once. 
	It didn't start until I'd changed my login shell to bash (or was
it until I added 'tset' to ~/.profile?), although, it could just be that
had I logged into 7 or 8 vtys with csh it would've locked up, too.
	My conclusion was that since, technically, the GENERIC kernel
isn't supposed to run on 4MB machines (like mine) running a large number
of processes at a time would kill it.  Guessing that each copy of bash
started probably fork()'ed and exec()'ed several zillion times, I assumed
that this was the problem (although, AFAIK, it's never happened except
when logging in).
	Since you have 16MB ram, that doesn't help my theory. :(
	From looking into it at the time, I seem to remember that the
current process one of the times was still getty, but don't hold me to
that. 

--
Outnumbered?  Maybe.  Outspoken?  Never!
tIM...HOEk




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