[netatalk-admins] Massive dropped connections - any ideas?

Subject: [netatalk-admins] Massive dropped connections - any ideas?
From: Kevin Myer (kevin_myer@elanco.k12.pa.us)
Date: Wed Apr 21 1999 - 09:07:40 EDT

Hi,

Awhile back, I had written that I was having problems with keeping
Appletalk connections alive on a netatalk box. Suggestions were made that
the problem was the ethernet card, client operating system or client
etherent card. However, none of these seem to make sense and as I am
hoping to move all our AppleShare stuff to a netatalk box, I really need
to figure out what is causing this.

First, the hardware:

Originally, I was running this off of my own workstation, a homemade box
with an AMD K6-2 300Mhz processor, 128Mb of RAM and a 3com 905b ethernet
card. I was running kernels 2.1.x up through 2.2.1.

Thinking it might be the ethernet card or machine, I switched the service
to a box with dual Pentium II's running at 300Mhz with 512Mb of RAM and
currently running kernel 2.2.3. The card is an Intel EtherPro 100+.

Now the problem:

On both machines, connections are randomly dropped. In some cases, there
is massive connection dropping, i.e. a whole lab goes offline at the same
time. In some cases, its just a matter of having a teacher log into the
volumes again. In other cases, the server won't respond to Appletalk
requests, although Appleshare IP requests work ok. In even other cases,
the server won't respond at all. In the latter case, for whatever reason,
all the netatalk related daemons have died (a good reason its not
responding) but there's no clue in the logs as to why they died - just a
slew of dropped connections and then silence.

I have read reports that both of the ethernet cards I am using are
troublesome when it comes to multicasting. I am not sure if that is my
problem or not. I do have the Intel card compiled with
multicast_filter_limit=3, which is supposed to take care of that problem
and I am using the latest ethernet card drivers.

I've read on these lists that people expereinced some Appletalk problems
after upgrading to the 2.2.x kernel series and I noticed in the latest
kernel release that there are Appletalk updates. However, I need to wait
for a set of RAID patches against the 2.2.6 kernel before upgrading the
server to see if that makes a difference.

I believe I can effectively rule out the clients as the problem, as they
all have six Appleshare volumes mounted off a Windows NT server that never
go down. Although it wouldn't suprise me that NT does something not right
to keep the connections alive, I have to assume that those connections are
working properly and its the netatalk/Linux/ethernet card combo that is
giving me trouble.

This is really troublesome to try and justify to the librarians and
supervisors that Linux is a good path to take, when stacked side by side
with NT (at least for the Services for Macs part), NT is far more stable.

I'm hoping someone can offer a suggestion to point me in the right
direction, or confirm a kernel or netatalk bug, or at least say "Yes,
I'm having that problem too".

If I haven't provided enough useful information, ask. I'll be glad to
supply it.

Thanks,

Kevin 

-- 
     ~        Kevin M. Myer
    . .       Network/System Administrator
    /V\       ELANCO School District
   // \
  /(   )\
   ^`~'^

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