timk@mipon2.intel.com (Tim Knox) (04/22/88)
We have a Vax 780 running Ultrix 2.0 that will periodically hang when /etc/nfsd is started. The first time we had the problem we were also having disk problems. The system hung after printing a couple 'hard error' messages on the console. We rebooted the system and the reboot went fine until it was time to start /etc/nfsd in /etc/rc.local. At that point the system hung again. We brought the system down, commented out the /etc/nfsd line from /etc/rc.local and tried again. This time the system came up fine (albeit without nfsd). We started /etc/nfsd after the system came up and again the system hung. We whittled our /etc/exports file down to one filesystem but to no avail. DEC came in and replaced the HDA on the offending disk drive and the problem went away for a couple weeks. Today the problem reappeared. The system hung, this time with no indication of hardware problems. Upon reboot the system hung on /etc/nfsd in /etc/rc.local. We have called DEC to come in and run some diagnostics on the hardware. Has anyone out there seen ever seen such a thing? If this is a hardware problem, why does it cause these symptoms? We don't have source, so the problem is pretty hard to diagnose. The Ultrix software support folks couldn't come up with anything. If you have any clues please let me know. Please respond by email. Tim Knox (...!verdix!omepd!timk) Intel Corp.
rob@ll-xn.UUCP (Robert S. Wood) (05/04/88)
[This came through as mail but seems to be of general interest -- AZ] It's software. If there is an nfs client trying to read - and it is behind and sending lots of reads/writes to the vax, then as soon as nfsd starts up, the system crashes. (Ultrix support should know about this.) It has not happened on our 2.2 systems.