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From: wicinski@NRL-CSS.ARPA (tim wicinski)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: TCP/IP woes
Message-ID: <8711231300.AA25389@nrl-css.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 23-Nov-87 07:59:59 EST
Article-I.D.: nrl-css.8711231300.AA25389
Posted: Mon Nov 23 07:59:59 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 25-Nov-87 23:54:22 EST
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The ARPA Internet
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Yes, I too have had MASSIVE TCP/IP problems.  the problems I have had
have been with the Domain/IX side of it, I never tried the Aegis side,
though it looked no better.  

routed/rwhod:  never would work. routed would find other route daemons,
but other route daemons could not.  if we ran rwho, no one would pick us
up.  we bagged that quickly.

sendmail:  bad sendmail problems.  supossedly, according to our big
Eunuch weenies, sendmail should run as a user process and not a root
process.  (can any one confirm this ?).  also, mail was never forwarded
and was stuck in the queue.  example: if someone send me mail to my
apollo, and i had my .forward file set to forward it to another machine,
it would get stuck in my apollo's mail queue and never make it out.
running /usr/lib/sendmail -q as root and as joe user did no good, it
never attempted to run thru the queue. also mailq will never show you
any queued messages unless you were root.

ethernet storms:  from time to time we have these intense ethernet
storms when someone comes on the net with a bad broadcast address, and
starts running their rwho daemon.  then about 150 machines freak out
when the rwho daemon broadcasts, and 150 machines starting sending arp
packets everywhere.  The load is incredible, and the burst rate and the
rate of occurence (every minute) is enough to hang the Ethernet
controller within a half hour.  this is pretty frustrating, and
sometimes there is little we can do about this (this problem also
prevented our diskless suns from booting, but we did not figure out the
problem for awhile). 

nfs:  nfs seems to work fine for most stuff, but in one case i can't get
it working:  I mount a nfs directory (ie, only  a directory from an NFS
partition was exported) as a root file system (in the // directory), and
from the gateway node everything is fine, but from the others machines
in the ring, it does not recognize the partition.  when an attempt to do
an ls on partition from a non-gw node, all that shows up is .*

patch tapes:  not only have i not heard about the latest patch tape, but
i was told by the 800 # to call the local sales office for a patch
tape, and NO ONE their ever heard of one.  I called our service guy, and
talked to three other service people, some tech support people, and the
so-called "s/w librarian" all who said the same thing:  never heard of
one.  

oh well, can't have anything you want

tim wicinski 
naval research labs