ftp/tcp: accept: No buffer space available

[Zeev Schultz]

Steve,
Its hard to say since this message is general
regarding ENOBUFS (man accept). There were some applications that produced these messages and hanged. I think your case should be investigated, ie checking what applications are running, doing some network checks, etc. For example, you should check in syslog.log if there were another application messages before inetd reported this error.

Zeev

[rick jones]

Indeed, 99 times out of ten, this message has nothing to do with availability of memory. It means that by the time the server application got around to calling accept() on the listen socket, the remote client had given-up (for wahtever reason) and aborted the connection. The exact reason why an ENOBUF is returned in this case in HP-UX 11.X is starting to get lost in the mists of time, but it had something to do with not wanting to leave the application stuck in an accept() call if that was the only connection left on the listen queue, and needing to return what applications were expected to be treating as a transient error.

Of course, some applications were not correctly treating ENOBUF as a transient error... :(

The only "fix" is to make sure the server application can get around to calling accept() in time - either by making the server application run faster, or by making the client more forgiving. Otherwise, unless it is happening a _lot_ or if apps are not correctly treating it as a transient condition, it can be safely ignored.