[757] in linux-net channel archive
timebomb
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Marcus Nilsson)
Sat Jul 22 10:21:39 1995
Date: Sat, 22 Jul 1995 12:20:36 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Marcus Nilsson <marcus@kuai.se>
To: linux-net@vger.rutgers.edu
We are an Internet Provider that began with Linux 0.99.8, and we have had
many crashes since then. However we have stuck with Linux anyway, and
1.2.x was a huge improvement i stability. Now I read in a comp.linux.
group, that prior to 1.2.9, there was a race condition which made linux
crash when there was high network and serial activity. We are running
1.2.10 at the moment, and linux still crashes at least 2 times a week. No
kernel panics, just a freeze. The only thing you can do is switching the
consoles, but you can not write anything.
Now, we are having a term.server rlogin'ing in to our box, so we haven't
any serial activity what so ever. We have one separate linux machine
acting as a NFS-server, to protect our file systems. The only thing it
runs is nfs-server, and it never crashes. We have 32 lines in, and at
evenings we have over 20 users logged in. Some of them are running
SLIP(not TIA, Linux's native SLIP).
In this case, we naturally have a lot of network activity. Before we had
NE2000 cards, but we have switched to 3c509-cards(NE2000 crashed many
times before). If there is a race condition in the 3Com cards, we'd be
more than happy to switch to a card that works.
As a programmer myself, I know that this kind of problems is the worst.
"It hangs sometimes". But you did fix something in 1.2.9, as stated
above, so perhaps you should take a look at it again. Again, we have not
any serial activity, but a heavy network load(I even linked /etc/password
and /etc/shadow over NFS, NIS didn't work, it just crashed).
Until then, for us, Linux is still a ticking timebomb.
/Marcus Nilsson, Kuai Scandinavia AB.
