3b2 problem

[Steve Paddock]

In article <383 at mancol.UUCP> samperi at mancol.UUCP (Dominick Samperi) writes:
>Every once in a while (perhaps once per month) a 3b2/300 that we are using
>here gets a little "sick," ....  What happens is that the
>dialin lines become unusable. One can connect, but characters don't seem to
>get through to the machine. Some do (they are echoed), and sometimes it is
>possible to actually login by blindly typing a username/password, each
>terminated with CTRL-J (the newline key doesn't work). A reboot always
>fixes the problem, but if someone is not around to reboot for a day or
>two, there are problems, since this machine polls for news each night,
>and news gets backed up at the feed. Thanks.

You forgot to mention release number, which can be important.  If it
is 2.0, you might try the ports-hang fix from the Hotline.   It could
also be the high PID count bug.  There is a fix for 2.0.4, and it is
finally fixed in one of the 3.n releases, but there was a documented
bug, finally proven, that the system began to ignore ports as the 
process id numbers approached rollover at 32K.  Part of why this took
so long to find and fix was that the common solution (which you might
try) was to put shutdown -y -g0 -i6 in crontab each night.

I've also seen similar symptoms in the getty wars problem where
a modem and port (or a direct link) are echoing login: login: back
to one another.

Good luck... This can be solved once you find the particular cause
at your site.

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Steve Paddock  ut-emx!mybest!paddock 
	       or uunet!bigtex!mybest!paddock