Subject: Probs with netatalk -- server crashes

From: John L Grantham <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2001 03:35:11 +0100

Hi all,

I've been having some weird troubles with netatalk-1.4b2+asun2.1.3-7 
on a beige G3 with LinuxPPC 2000 Q4, kernel 2.2.18, an Asante 
10/100BaseT Ethernet card, and IBM 30 GB Deskstar IDE drive.

It all had been working just fine for months until today, literally 
as I was working and saving a file to the server from a Mac.

The Macs are all running Mac OS 9.1, most connected via 100BaseT Ethernet.

Here is the phenomenon:

1. When I try to copy a file to the server, the Mac reads the file 
into memory, then gets stuck once trying to send it to the server; 
eventually, the server will close the connection. Meanwhile, the 
server keeps trying to write the file (even after the connection is 
closed) so that it balloons to many megabytes (even over a gigabyte) 
in size, until I stop atalkd and kill -9 afpd (that seems to be the 
only way to stop this from happening more).

2. Copying from the server works fine most of the time, but sometimes 
during a long copy, especially involving many files, the server will 
close the connection before the copy is finished.

When problem 2 shows up, this appears in /var/log/messages:

Mar 21 03:27:11 localhost afpd[946]: dsi_stream_read(-1): Connection 
reset by peer
Mar 21 03:27:11 localhost afpd[946]: dsi_stream_write: Broken pipe
Mar 21 03:27:11 localhost afpd[946]: 1091.27KB read, 28239.01KB written
Mar 21 03:27:11 localhost PAM_pwdb[946]: (netatalk) session closed 
for user John
Mar 21 03:27:11 localhost afpd[946]: dsi_stream_write: Broken pipe
Mar 21 03:27:11 localhost afpd[670]: server_child[1] 946 exited 1

If other Macs are connected, they don't seem to be affected, unless 
they are also trying to copy at the same time.

I had a power outage yesterday, but I checked the filesystems with 
fsck -fv, and everything seems to be okay. And it worked okay after 
the outage -- just suddenly stopped working today.

The only other thing that changed on the server today was that I 
installed a Voodoo graphic card -- but that can't affect it, can it?

Everything else on the computer seems to work fine (XFree86, normal 
copying, SSH/scp, etc.).

As it happens, I also tried updating to netatalk-1.5pre5, and ended 
up having exactly the same problems others have mentioned -- not 
being able to copy to the server because of a lack of access 
privileges, with resource files showing up in .AppleDouble with no 
permissions (---------). So I downgraded to 1.4b2+asun2.1.3-7 again, 
and then the two problems above reappeared.

Any suggestions?

Cheers,

John

PS Please CC me on any response -- thanks!
-- 

John Grantham	| Dipl.-Designer (FH)
		| Homepage       http://design.macnews.de/
		| Linux for PPC  http://www.linuxppc.org/
Web Designer	| AGD Member     http://www.agd.de/

---

From: John L Grantham <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2001 05:15:54 +0100

At 9:50 pm -0600 20/3/01, Takashi Oe wrote:
>On Wed, 21 Mar 2001, John L Grantham wrote:
>
>>  >[...]
>>  >Is the built-in network used in this scenario?
>>
>>  It is used, yes, but only for connecting to DSL. The Asante card is
>>  connected to the LAN.
>
>Ok, so it's not a bmac problem for sure.  Well, I suppose you could remove
>the voodoo card and see if anything changes as it is the only change.  You
>have changed your kernel, right?

Actually, no. I hadn't gotten that far yet. ;-)

One thing I just tried for the hell of it (let's just say I start 
getting, er, "creative" at 5 am...):

chmod -R g+s /netatalk/mount/point

That seems to have solved the problem of copying *to* the server, but 
*from* the server is still goofy. But why the permissions would 
suddenly all go blooey is a mystery...

Naturally I get this to halfway work _after_ hours of painstakingly 
copying files to various Macs in the LAN in preparation for a 
reformat of the drive. *sigh*

cya

John
--