Date: Sun, 31 Dec 1995 16:26:12 +1100 (EST) From: michael butler <imb@scgt.oz.au> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: 2.1 instabilities Message-ID: <199512310526.QAA08841@asstdc.scgt.oz.au>
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As a consequence of (not unexpected) instabilities in -current, I reverted four of my machines back to -stable but I have a few niggling problems. Two of them occasionally stop dead whilst under heavy ppp load. Both are using kernel-based ppp. One of them simply stops blinking his cursor and simply goes to sleep. No keyboard response, nothing :-(. Very rarely, it will just spontaneously reboot (which I'd actually prefer as it's 4km away). The other, the only other under such a heavy load, stops forwarding IP packets and a ping (from the host itself) to any one of the remote users returns a "cannot write, no buffers available" error. The mbuf cluster count is <100 although there are usually somewhere around 100-300 mbufs allocated to data (load dependent). Killing any pppd will solve the problem until the next recurrence. Both have 16 meg of RAM. The first is a 486DX/33 with 2 NE2000-clones, the second, a 486DX2/66 with a single WD8013EPC and both serve ~200-500 meg of news per day with c-news (IMHO they have insuffcient RAM for INN). Both machines have only 4 modems attached each with an AST 4-port clone fitted with NS16550AFN ports. Neither have APM. The machine that goes to sleep completely has had _everything_ changed except for the SCSI drive .. that's RAM, power-supply, mother-board, ethernet cards, SCSI controller .. nothing makes any difference although reducing RAM size to 8 meg yields a dead machine within 20 minutes :-(. Switching to user-mode PPP is not an option .. each link is sufficiently saturated so as to cause echo packets to be lost (or delayed beyond its tolerance). Using it, none of them will stay connected for >15 minutes with the end-user's current data rates (bulk NNTP traffic yielding averages above 3000cps). HELP ! (please :-)) michael
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