Soft updates problems with 5.2.1-RC1

[Andrew Rutherford]

At 10:36 AM +1030 18/2/04, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:

>Based on the fact that this happens when big mail messages are being
>received, we've guessed that the file system in question is /var, and
>we've turned off soft updates there.  We're both out of town
>effectively for the rest of the week, and we'll continue looking after
>that, but if anybody has any thoughts, we'd be grateful.

More information - softupdates was turned off, and the backtraces 
stopped coming, but nat still stops working when the system is under 
load. Interestingly, they have a number of nat daemons running 
(different external IP's for different internal IP ranges), and it 
seems the nat daemons affected are those that are idle at the time of 
the system load.

For example, in one burst of system load around noon, natd #1 was 
busy and natd #2 was idle, and the operation of natd #2 failed. 
Correct operation resumed when /etc/rc.firewall was run again to 
reload the ipfw rules, while the natd itself was not restarted. In 
the evening of the same day, natd #1 was idle and natd #2 was busy 
when a large burst of email (not under NAT) went through the system, 
and natd #1 was not operating correctly.

-- 
Andrew Rutherford      sip:andrewr at iagu.net      244 Pirie Street
Iagu Networks          tel:+61-8-8425-2255       Adelaide SA 5000
http://www.iagu.net/   mailto:andrewr at iagu.net   Australia