[2646] in linux-net channel archive
Multiport hellp
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jon Lewis)
Thu Apr 25 10:38:46 1996
Date: Wed, 24 Apr 1996 14:19:34 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jon Lewis <jlewis@inorganic5.fdt.net>
To: Linux Net Mailing List <linux-net@vger.rutgers.edu>
I've got 2 64-port terminal servers...ewok and endor. Ewok was recently a
486-100 with 2 32 port RocketPort cards. It would kernel panic often
(like just about daily)...even after applying about every 1.2.13 bug-fix I
could find. I started to blame things on rocket.o (RocketPort driver)
race conditions, heard that a faster CPU might do the trick, and so I
upgraded ewok to a P100. Since then it's been up 26 days.
In the interest of science and stable terminal servers, I decided to put
64 ports of Cyclades gear into ewok's old 486-100 board. It ran for 5
days while I configured things, then I put close to 40 modems on it. I
call this one endor. Endor then started locking up every 24 hours. On a
tip from Cyclades, I turned off swap (it has plenty of RAM for what it
does) and it ran a few days. I've kept swap disabled, and now instead of
locking up, it kernel panics every few days.
Endor just panic'd again...this time under very light load:
Wed Apr 24 13:30:02 EDT 1996
1:30pm up 3 days, 11:34, 9 users, load average: 0.00, 0.02, 0.04
total used free shared buffers
Mem: 31168 30472 696 7172 19988
-/+ buffers: 10484 20684
Swap: 0 0 0
Apr 24 13:32:08 endor pppd[28341]: remote IP address 205.229.51.140
Apr 24 13:32:49 endor pppd[29774]: pppd 2.2.0 started by topherjc, uid 333
Apr 24 13:36:31 endor syslogd: restart
Apr 24 13:36:32 endor kernel: Kernel logging (proc) started.
Apr 24 13:36:32 endor kernel: kswap 2.2.1.3 (Exp 1995/06/03 04:10:43)
Again, it panic'd and then rebooted itself with the reset_on_panic
patch. Nothing about the Oops got logged...it rarely does...but the
interesting thing is that this mode of crash, panic right as a PPP
session starts up, is exactly what the RocketPort based system used to
do. It used to do this under pppd 2.1.2d, 2.2.0e, and 2.2.0f...so it
would seem unlikely that the PPP code is at fault, but it seems very much
to me that the problem is independant of the RocketPort and Cyclades
drivers, and must be elsewhere in the 1.2.13 kernel.
It should be noted that I'm not using a standard (known to be quite
buggy) 1.2.13...but a heavily bugfix patched one. I'm using all of the
bugfixes at http://trishul.sci.gu.edu.au/~tony/linux/patches.html, and
have been for some time.
Endor's P100 parts and case just came in today...so I'll start building
that this afternoon. I suspect endor will magically stabilize as ewok
did once it's on a P100 board.
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