[1499] in SIPB-AFS-requests
["Richard Basch": [Liz_Hines@transarc.com: AFS-related OS patches]]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Matt Braun)
Thu Sep 22 11:15:26 1994
To: sipb-afsreq@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 1994 11:13:51 EDT
From: Matt Braun <mhbraun@MIT.EDU>
FYI
------- Forwarded Message
Date: Wed, 21 Sep 1994 14:46:02 -0400 (EDT)
From: Liz_Hines@transarc.com
To: AFS_Contacts@transarc.com
Subject: AFS-related OS patches
AFS Customers:
There have been a couple of defects reported by our customers that
required fixes from vendors for their OS, which are now available.
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The first one is for AIX 3.2.5 systems. Under certain conditions, an
AIX filesystem could become corrupted. Our customers have seen this
happen on AFS vice partitions on AIX fileservers, under certain stress
conditions. This problem has been going on for some time, and IBM
provided fixes in AIX 3.2.5 that addressed many of the situations that
caused these problems. Some sites still saw problems after installing
AIX 3.2.5, so an additional patch is necessary. All of the sites that
we are aware of who encountered these problems under AIX 3.2.5 have
received a temporary patch from IBM's AIX support group.
The typical symptom our customers see is that they can't bring volumes
on-line and after trying several things, they discover that v3fshelper
reports "not an AIX3 filesystem".
The PTF to fix this problem is U433623. The APAR number for this
ix45394. With these numbers you should be able to get the necessary
patch from IBM AIX support for this problem.
NOTE: this PTF apparently also includes a fix for a time-of-day
problem, and you must reset your system date and time after applying
this PTF. The instructions from IBM for this PTF include this
warning and instructions for when to set the correct date and time.
There is an extra complication due to AFS fileservers, since an
incorrect date on a fileserver can get propogated to clients. Be
careful to set the date before bringing your fileserver processes back
up to prevent cache managers from picking up the wrong date.
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The second patch is for Ultrix 4.3a systems. A number of our
customers were seeing kernel hangs on Ultrix systems running AFS,
caused by AFS trying to obtain more kernel memory than Ultrix systems
provided. Based on input from Digital support, we made configuration
recommendations to our customers to provide more kernel memory to AFS.
It appears that Digital has produced a software patch to help in this
area. Our information about this patch has been obtained through some
of our customers, so we don't have many details on this patch. Please
contact Digital support for further information.
The patch number is CLD 7BXB35390. Here is the description that comes
with the patch:
Param.c now contains a new configurable parameter 'guardpages'
which is defaulted to GUARDPAGES. This global variable may be
set to 0 for systems where wired/unwired kernel memory is in
great demand, say an AFS file server. Usually, the 'physmem'
parameter in such system is set to a value larger than the
amount of physical memory. Currently setting 'physmem' to
110 and 'guardpages' to 0 will give the system the maximum
amount of wired/unwired kernel memory available.
Note that you will have to rebuild the kernel to utilize this patch.
- --------------------
Liz Hines
Director of Product Support
Transarc Corporation
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