From: osyjm@cs.montana.edu (Jaye Mathisen)
Subject: Anybody using an infoserver with Ultrix client? (heap'em big'um problems)
Organization: CS
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1992 00:31:44 GMT


[ If you're seriously considering making use of an infoserver on your network
to interact with  Ultrix hosts, you should probably peruse this, it's got
some stuff about difficulties I'm having making it "work" correctly, and
an infoserver is a significant $$$ investment to make, and then not have
it work...(right)]

Hardware/Software:
Decstation 5000/240, Ultrix 4.2C, Infoserver client for Ultrix RISC 1.0,
Decsystem 5500, Ultrix 4.2A, Infoserver client for Ultrix RISC 1.0,
Decstation 5000/200, Ultrix 4.2A, Infoserver client for Ultrix RISC 1.0...
Infoserver 150, version 2.1 software.

I'm hosed.  Nobody at DEC support can help, they said "The infoservers
were too new, they didn't know much about them".  Some answer.  Especially
since they aren't new, although the infoserver client for ultrix
RISC is.  Hell, it took 20 minutes of arguing with the person to get them
convinced that what I wanted to do was even possible, they only thought
I could do this with VMS...  Oh well, I suppose it takes time for
new product info to get to all the people inside DEC...
---
The problem:

I create a partition on the infoserver, create a service for the partition,
bind, newfs, mount the partition on the above-listed machines.

At apparently random times, accessing those partitions results in "No
such device or address" errors, and the disk has to be umounted and
remounted, which clears the problem for some random time period.

What's bizarre is that I have 5 ISO9660 CDROM's mounted on these same
DEC machines from the infoserver, and they NEVER have had a problem.  It's
only the [ULTRIX] class formatted partitions. Even when the [ULTRIX] disks
go offline, the [ISO_9660] drives are still accessible.

I haven't been able to recreate the problem consistently, other than
that it happens several times a day, but no apparent pattern.

Since normal tech-support can't help... if some person at DEC reading this
can forward it to the infoserver client people, it'd be great.  Even if I
don't hear from them, perhaps they'll get it in gear and get it fixed
in the next release.

I can crash both the infoserver and the host by running iozone, on a 
semi-regular basis, seems to happen 1 out of 3 times, and only if the
test is a long one...  ie, testing iozone for a 1MB file hasn't wiped it
out, iozone for a 200MB file kills it pretty regularly.

One other person on the net contacted me when I posted about this earlier,
detailing some problems he was having.  I now am seeing some of the same
junk, like having to fsck CDROM's. Occasionally, I can newfs a partition, mount
 it, umount it, and have to fsck it before I can mount it again.  Fsck it, and 
it still won't mount.  Do 2-3 more fsck's, and all of the sudden it's 
mountable, even though it's totally empty. 

If anybody has any suggestions, hints, or heard anything from DEC that
has any help, patches, whatever, please email me...

Note that the infoserver has performed flawlessly as a paging host for
our VXT2000's, and it is working fine with our VMS hosts, it's just the
Ultrix stuff that seems to be working like sh*t...
-- 
 Jaye Mathisen, COE Systems Manager                (406) 994-4780
 410 Roberts Hall,Dept. of Computer Science
 Montana State University,Bozeman MT 59717	osyjm@cs.montana.edu
Newsgroups: comp.unix.ultrix