My original message griped of three things:
1) Patches in the patch report not appearing on sunsolv.sun.com
2) Pine hanging over NFS mail spool
3) Virtual Interfaces using round robin IP addresses
About the patches. Apparently, despite spending a _lot_ of money on
Solaris 2.6 RTU's and media, I am not entitled to a working operating
system. Because I don't have a support contract, I'm only entitled to
recommended patches and security patches. THERE IS HOPE. Icase has put out
a super-dooper shell script that automajically brings your Sunos 4.x/5.x
machine up to date on patches. They also have md5 verified patch files.
Awesome. See http://www.icase.edu/docs/library/sunos/patch.html
2) About pine. Someone recommended running truss on pine. I noted that
when it was hanging, it was doing a ton of writev() system calls. My big
problem with pine was with large mailbox files. It would regularly hang
for no reason, like while scrolling down a message, or when deleting a lot
of messages or closing the mailbox. Apparently, pine checks the time very
often, and performs routine scans of the mailbox. In fact, pine checks the
time in between keystrokes. My NFS client, my mail server and my NFS
server all had slightly different times, and this was causing pine to have
puppies reading the mailbox file. Many people suggested packet loss as the
problem, but this was a time problem. Syncing the time of the servers
fixed it.
As far as the virtual interfaces go, the system uses a random IP address
from its pool on each outbound connection. Using ndd to turn off group
interfaces fixes the problem, but the system will use the last interface
ifconfig'd as its default, and reconfiging hme0 will break everything.
Someone recommended setting the netmask on the virtual interfaces to
255.255.255.255. I think this will work, as it will only route packets out
that virtual interface that were sent to it. RIght now, they all have
255.255.255.0, which is causing many many routes to the same network. I
had posted a lengthy summary on this earlier, but this appears to be the
missing link. Thanks to Joe Pruett for pointing this out.
Thanks to:
Rich Pieri
Joe Pruett
Russ Poffenberger
Gregory Coleman
David Thorburn-Gun
Karl Vogel
Rachel Polanskis
Simon Convey
... and Jake the wonder dog for fetching my manuals.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 5 May 1998 10:40:41 -0400 (EDT)
From: Admin Staff <admin1@berkshire.net>
To: Sun Managers <sun-managers@ra.mcs.anl.gov>
Subject: Solaris 2.6 problems
Followup-To: Admin Staff <admin1@berkshire.net>
TIA
-Jason
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:12:39 CDT