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From: andy@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Andy S Poling)
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
Subject: Re: How to time-out nntp connections
Summary: yes and no
Keywords: timeout, file descriptors, inetd
Message-ID: <6971@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU>
Date: 23 Nov 90 05:03:25 GMT
References: <1990Nov20.235832.509@wdl1.wdl.fac.com>
Followup-To: news.software.nntp
Distribution: na
Organization: The Johns Hopkins University - HCF
Lines: 37

In article <1990Nov20.235832.509@wdl1.wdl.fac.com> wrl@wdl1.wdl.fac.com (Bill Lewandowski) writes:
>Background: NNTP1.5.10 sun 3/280 4.0.3
>
>Hi,
>I have a sun server which is our news master. I have 100
>nntp clients who get there news from the server.
>
>We have been running into problems where inetd locks
>new connections out (telnet,rlogin) until someone
>logs off. We think we have hit some type of process table
>limit. We have done some tweaking but no-go.
>
>The only thing we notice is that there are upto 20 nntp connections
>open at one time sitting idle. People are just leaving
>rn,trn,xrn,nn etc open even though there are not reading news.
>
>Question:
>Is there a way to time out these connections after so much idle
>time connected to the nntp port (119) for these users ???

I could be wrong (I'm no BSD or SunOS guru), but I think the limitation
you're seeing is the number of file-descriptors that inetd can have open.

To answer your question... yes, there is a compile-time option to
automatically time-out idle connections.  I had problems with this time-out
code under SysVr3.1.5 - it was timeing connections out after seemingly
random intervals.  I don't yet know whether the fault was with the
NNTP1.5.10 code or a SysV problem - my short term solution was to undef the
compile time option for time-outs.

-Andy

--
Andy Poling                              Internet: andy@gollum.hcf.jhu.edu
UNIX Systems Programmer                  Bitnet: ANDY@JHUNIX
Homewood Academic Computing              Voice: (301)338-8096    
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