duncan@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Duncan McEwan) (03/20/89)
I have spent some time trying to puzzle out the cause of the following
problem with kip0688/cap5.0 on a pyramid with a KFPS-3, but have had
no success.
It all started when I installed and ran Aufs (the apple unix file server)
on this pyramid, but was unable to see the Aufs server either from a mac
on the localtalk or from the pyramid (using caps "atlook" program).
I ran atis (cap's appletalk information server) with debugging and discovered
that it was rejecting *all* the incomming lookup packets that it received with
the following diagnostics.
atis: Fri Mar 17 12:31:16 1989 Got nbp 1 lkup from net 55.9, node 1, skt 129
atis: Fri Mar 17 12:31:16 1989 pkt2c_entity_names: invalid length!
By adding further debugging to the lowest level of the cap library, I was able
to determine that the packets being returned by the Unix "recvmsg" system call
contained an invalid zone name in the tuple describing the object being looked
up (it should have been =:=@APMB1, but the length field of the zone name was
55, and the name was "^I^EAPMB1". In other words, the packet contained two
spurious characters -- ascii 55 ('7') and ascii 9 ('^I') -- the '^E' in the
zone name string I saw is clearly the real zone length field of 5). Since the
max zone name length is supposed to be 32, it is not suprising that the cap
routines complained about these packets. In all the tests I have looked run,
these spurious characters have occured consistently in *every* lookup packet.
Since the bad packet is returned by the Unix recvmsg call, that seems to rule
out the cap libraries on the pyramid garbaging the packet. That leave the
pyramid's UDP kernel software/ethernet hardware, the ethernet cable, or the
KFPS harware/software. Given the large number of other programs that use
UDP/ethernet, I tend to suspect the latter. Does anyone know of any problems
with K-Boxes generating bad packets. Unfortunately I don't have the Rom
revision level of this Kbox handy at the moment, but it must be over 2 years
old by now.
Just to further confuse matters, I have access to another pyramid with
a similar setup, with its own kbox, running exactly the same copy of the
gateway code and the cap software, and it works fine.
If anyone knows of any problems with kbox's of approximately this vintage I
would be delighted to hear from them. Also, if anyone has any idea how I can
further pinpoint the problem, I would like to hear it (I would really like to
see exactly what packets the kbox is sending on the ethernet, but we don't have
any facilities for doing that).
Duncan