Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!samsung!usc!wuarchive!mit-eddie!media-lab!amt!saus
From: saus@bijou.media.mit.edu (Mark Sausville)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.ultrix
Subject: Re: Gnode table full
Message-ID: <SAUS.90Sep19122934@bijou.media.mit.edu>
Date: 19 Sep 90 16:29:34 GMT
References: <2731@cernvax.UUCP>
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In-reply-to: dietrich@cernvax.UUCP's message of 14 Sep 90 10:03:15 GMT


In article <2731@cernvax.UUCP> dietrich@cernvax.UUCP (dietrich wiegandt) writes:

   From: dietrich@cernvax.UUCP (dietrich wiegandt)
   Newsgroups: comp.unix.ultrix,comp.unix.internals
   Keywords: gnode table overflow
   Date: 14 Sep 90 10:03:15 GMT
   Followup-To: comp.unix.ultrix

   Hardware: VAX8530
   Software: ULTRIX 3.1

   Any idea by what manipulation we might have got in such a state?  We don't
   know for how long we have been running with a gnode table threatening to
   overflow, so the problem may have arisen days before we noticed it.

   We have a rather special environment with many machines from different
   manufacturers and lots of NFS mounts (including possibly this user's files)
   to remote machines going on.

   Any hints would be very much appreciated.

   Dietrich Wiegandt
   CERN CN Division

A patch to version 3.1 exists (available from the support center)
which purports to fix a panic related to gnodes, NFS mounts and quotas.

We had a problem similar to yours caused by an application which
seemed to corrupt gnodes.  

After some investigation (the gnode code is way hairy), we decided
to host the application elsewhere.  It is clear to me that it's possible
to wedge gnodes over NFS, but since I couldn't find a simple way
to recreate the problem, I didn't pursue it with DEC.

I would suggest that you try to correlate with some application.  In
our case, it was an ethertalk file service serving files which were
NFS mounted on the ethertalk server.

					Mark.

Mark Sausville                           MIT Media Laboratory
617-253-0325                             Room E15-354
Fax: 617-258-6264                        20 Ames Street
saus@media-lab.media.mit.edu             Cambridge, MA 02139