problems with SunOS 4.1

[John F. Ormonde]

Up until Monday we were cruising along with no problems on our 3/280,
16MB, 2-892 disks on a 451 controller serving 13 3/60s all running 4.0.3
Tuesday SUN installed 16MB, a second ethernet controller,  another 892
disk and a 7053 controller.  One of the existing disks was moved onto the
7053.  I then added more variables to the equation by installing 4.1.
Since then things have been most unpleasant.  A list of problems/symptoms
in no particular order follows:

1) Diskless client booting problems:
   Boot: vmunix
   .Size: 873240.......X..X.....{more '.'s and a few 'X's} 
   ...+173280+218672 bytes

   Statistics:
   rpc: {various rpc stats}
   le:  {various ethernet packet stats}

   continues with normal boot. This happens intermittently on random
   clients.

2) Mailtool: aborts with the following error msg:
   Mailtool not able to communicate with Mail!
   (Perhaps Mail is not an executable appropriate for this machine.)

   and mail takes a very long time to retrieve a 14000 byte mail file when
   run on either clients and the server.

3) /usr/etc/etherd and traffic:
   etherd dies due to rpc timeouts/failures

4) Clients get random NFS and RPC timeouts.

5) A find thru many (100s) subdirectories brought the system to its knees
   for >15 min.  It never took that long on the 451 controller and I thought
   the 7053 was supposed to be faster.

I have tried my kernel, the generic kernel, pulling the 2nd ethernet
board, run sysdiag and calling our local SUN SW person and the SUN 800
number.  I am seriously considering going back to 4.0.3 unless I can get
some help from somewhere.

Please reply via e-mail.

Thanks
john ormonde
jfo at mimsy.umd.edu