3b2-310 lost characters

[randy]

In article <193 at osi3b2.UUCP> james at osi3b2.UUCP (James R. Van Artsdalen) writes:
>
>After the upgrade, we began having trouble with the serial lines.  Every so
>often the system would get into a mode wherein it would lose characters on
>the serial ports.  
>On the basis of some rumors I've upped the NCLIST value to 200 from 80 and
>James R. Van Artsdalen    ...!decvax!dartvax!osi3b2!james    Live Free or Die

	I have a 3b2/300 with 2 megs memory, and 3 ports cards.  I have two 
9600 baud terminals connected to console and contty.  All the ports card have
2400 baud modems on them.   What you describe happens about once a week with
out fail.  When it happens, it happens on all ports, console included.  Only
way to fix is to shutdown and restart.  I have played with clists from 50 to
300 with no change.   It did not happen until I upgraded to 2.0.4
	Another strange thing with 2.0.4 is that a number of times a day,
the i/o system just *stops*!  Processing continues on and characters echo
at the terminals, but nothing happens.   From 30 seconds to 5 minutes
it just sits, then bang, every thing continues on as if nothing happened.
It seems to be disk i/o related.  I can be sitting at the console when it
happens, look over at the modem that a uucp is going on, and watch the flow
go fine for  about a half minute.  Then it starts timing out, as if a buffer
got filled and had to go to the disk.   Generally, uucp times out before the
system fires back up again.  By various experiments, I have found a combination
of things agravate the problem.  If I set NBUFS to over 300 *AND* any program
is set sticky bit, it runs rampant.  I have had to un sticky /bin/sh, rnews,
vi and all others, or the system is unusable.  Is it my 300 only, or is
this common?


-- 
.. that's the biz, sweetheart...
Randy Suess
chinet - Public Access UN*X
(312) 545 7535 (h) (312) 283 0559 (system)
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