barnett@grymoire.crd.ge.com (Bruce Barnett) (06/01/91)
Three times our network has been swamped by a Macintosh. The Macintosh, running MaTCP and a SMTP client, started generating ARP requests at a rate of 2000 requests a second. This had the net effect (sorry) of making many of the 1000 machines on our ethernet very sick. The SMTP vendor says this is a well-known bug in MacTCP 1.0.1, and it will be fixed in a future release. (1.1?) Does anyone know a fix/workaround? We cannot tolerate this storm. -- Bruce G. Barnett barnett@crdgw1.ge.com uunet!crdgw1!barnett
Wayne.Wilson@med.umich.edu (06/03/91)
In article <BARNETT.91May31153906@grymoire.crd.ge.com> barnett@grymoire.crd.ge.com (Bruce Barnett) writes: > Three times our network has been swamped by a Macintosh. > The Macintosh, running MaTCP and a SMTP client, started generating ARP > requests at a rate of 2000 requests a second. This had the net effect > (sorry) of making many of the 1000 machines on our ethernet very sick. > > The SMTP vendor says this is a well-known bug in MacTCP 1.0.1, and it > will be fixed in a future release. (1.1?) > > Does anyone know a fix/workaround? We cannot tolerate this storm. > -- > Bruce G. Barnett barnett@crdgw1.ge.com uunet!crdgw1!barnett We too discovered this problem while using the SMTP gateway. Until Apple fixes this rather serious bug in MacTCP, we have done two things to minimize the impact. 1) Split the network into smaller pieces using routers and 2) connecting the SMTP gateway machine to a Cabletron active hub and setting a traffic threshold, such that when the storm starts, the Cabletron turns off the port, thus isolating the machine.