topic Re: URGENT: FTP problem in Operating System - OpenVMS

URGENT: FTP problem

Willem Grooters — Wed, 19 Nov 2003 03:21:18 GMT

I have a problem with FTP that I'm not able to tackle but needs to be solved in short term.
Machine: DS01-L, 2 NICs, DQ-disk (ATAPI), VMS 7.3-1, TCPIP 5.3-18 newly (fresh) installed; no eco's found in PROD SHOW HIST so my guess is NO ECO's installed (yet).
Both NICs set to 100Mb, full duplex, one of these in configured in VMS (so VMS sees just one). FTP service has bee enabled and is running.

Using FTP to set things up: NO problem at all getting files OFF the machine, but FTP GET eventually hangs the machine, the connection is lost at some point.

The same applies if the machine is accessed with FTP from antother machine. GET is no problem but PUT hangs the machine. I found even ^T does no longer work. So I crashed the machine (^P, then issued CRASH command)

The problem seems not related to the size of the transferred file.

We have a workaround, but still need to solve this.

What could have caused the problem and how to solve it (in reverse order, eventually. Solving is prime priority ;-))

If you need more information, I DO have this crashdump, so tell me what to do to get info out of it....

Re: URGENT: FTP problem

Karl Rohwedder — Wed, 19 Nov 2003 03:39:04 GMT

As a 1st blind shot I would install all
level 1 patches and the Eco2 aif TCPIP and retry

Re: URGENT: FTP problem

Willem Grooters — Wed, 19 Nov 2003 04:05:42 GMT

I know....
But another (VERY old: AXP2000) system, with 1 (100Mb?) NIC, same software environment so no patches, has NO problem at all. So my imprseeion is there's sometyhing wroong in the DS10L. Perhaps the second (not configured) NIC? (I did have problems (on another machine) with 2 NIC's)

Re: URGENT: FTP problem

Antoniov. — Wed, 19 Nov 2003 04:28:58 GMT

Crash of VMS is a bad notice.
This means that some module running kernel mode has caused error.
You could take aim better:
a)user connected is anonimous or is registered?
b)other user cause same problem?
c)in SYS$LOGIN of user, what do you read in log file TCPIP$FTP_SERVER.LOG?
d)what do read into SYS$SYSDEVICE:[TCPIP$FTP]?

Bye
Antoniov

Re: URGENT: FTP problem

Willem Grooters — Wed, 19 Nov 2003 04:54:32 GMT

Antonio

1. User is registered
2. Other user has the same problem

just tried these on a TELNET session.
I tried to copy a relatively small file (login.com normally is not that big ;-)), it _seems_ this is copied. But larger files fail. Happyly, VMS is not crashing, just the process is disconnected.

I found (after logging in) that the file I want to copy is created. At least, DIR/SIZ-ALL shows it's name and sizes but the actual size is still zero. (I could stop FTP by ^C this time). 3. FTP log shows nothing. One I found had elapsed time of over 1 hour but less than a second used CPU....BTW. This was NOT the one on the login-directory.

Started a second session for monitoring, and re-ussued FTP command on the first one. MONITOR SYSTEM on the second session shows NO action at all, and after some time it's connection is lost.
Trying to login again does not work, all activity seems to be frozen, you cannot even login....

Re: URGENT: FTP problem

Ian Miller. — Wed, 19 Nov 2003 05:03:57 GMT

Are you logging into the system via TELNET when you are monitoring the system? Could you use another protocol to connect during your monitoring (so you aren't using TCPIP)?

The problem may be specific to the ethernet card in the DS10. Your AS2000 does not have a problem because its a different card.

Installation of the patches makes sense - if you go to hp support with this then that's what they will say as they don't want to debug things already fixed in patches.

Re: URGENT: FTP problem

Willem Grooters — Wed, 19 Nov 2003 06:14:40 GMT

Some more info.
It turned out that even DIR within FTP halts the process, diconnecting it after some time, and even a (new) TELNET session is freezing and disconnected after some time.
Furthermore, people that worked on preparing the machine told me outbound FTP did work previously, but since the sysmgr that setup the system is not available, I cannot tell what has been done ;-(. It seems they did something with NFS, and NFS_CLIENT was enabled. So I disabled it.
Next, I rebooted the machine.
I found that VMS keeps telling me the interface is SIMPLEX:

WE0: flags=c43
inet 10.100.51.250 netmask fffffe00 broadcast 10.100.51.255 ipmtu 1500

but in SRM it is set to 100Mb FD. In practice (on the switches) it is indeed.
Routing looks ok as well:

$ tcpip show route

DYNAMIC

Type Destination Gateway

AN 0.0.0.0 10.100.50.1
AN 10.100.50.0/23 10.100.51.250
AH 10.100.51.250 10.100.51.250
AH 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1

First FTP I did, i started with DIR and here, data came in chunks - it looked as if the connection was stalled for a short while. Next GET (of a 380 block file) ran into timeout after some time (tens of minutes).

Re: URGENT: FTP problem

Martin P.J. Zinser — Wed, 19 Nov 2003 11:51:43 GMT

Hello Willem,

if we are talking a DEC 2000 (aka Jensen), the network speed will be 10 Mb, not 100 Mbit, so totatlly different drivers.

What NIC is in the DS10L? On-board or PCI card?

In case the system does not crash, do you see error counters on the device/tcpip?

Greetings, Martin

Re: URGENT: FTP problem

Willem Grooters — Wed, 19 Nov 2003 18:36:06 GMT

Martin,

On board - it's just one inch thick ;-)
And indeed: the device shows ONE error. No matter how often I try to FTP. That should not be the problem since outgoing FTP and telnet etc are Ok. It's only when files are transferred TO that machine that's gving trouble - that is: larger then a few blocks (Login.com, about 5 blocks, went Ok). No matter whether it's GET (from the machine itself) or PUT (from another machine). I tyried both 10Mb and 100Mb counterparts. No difference :-(
Is this a hint: Those two NICs, of which just one is configured in VMS? As said, I had similar (even worse) problems with two DE500NICs in my own machine (TCPIP duidn't work well either)

Re: URGENT: FTP problem

Mike Naime — Wed, 19 Nov 2003 23:18:23 GMT

You definitely want the TCPIP 5.3 ECO2 patch! This caused some crashes on some of our Early 7.3.1 systems before the ECO2 patch.

My one DS10L is running 7.2 and we have not patched it in 2 years. (It's not broken!)

At a minimum, I would also install the PCSI and UPDATE patch.

Note: a Shadow set copy/merge of a 350GB LUN will also tank the DS10 and cause it to freeze. :-)

Re: URGENT: FTP problem

Martin P.J. Zinser — Wed, 19 Nov 2003 23:22:13 GMT

Well ECO 2 is always a good idea (since you can not have 5.4 yet ;-)

Since the problem is incoming, what happens if you ping the system with large packetsizes (65k)?

Re: URGENT: FTP problem

Henk Ouwersloot — Thu, 20 Nov 2003 02:52:23 GMT

Hi Willem,

How are these systems connected to your network. Are these connected to a HUB/Switch? If that is the case, are the ports set to the same speed/mode?

Re: URGENT: FTP problem

Buenaventura Acera — Thu, 20 Nov 2003 03:02:29 GMT

I have suffered problems similar to this in other environments with ftp going ok in one direction and nook in reverse direction.

The final cause was an incorrectly setup of the Speed/Duplex characteristic between the Alpha system and the switch where it was connected.

Please review those settings.

My recomendation is:
1.- Put both sides in autonegotiation and watch the results. Verify the port counters for errors.

2.- Put both sides fixed at the same setting for speed and duplex. Again verify counters.

Hope this help.

Regards,
Ventura

Re: URGENT: FTP problem

Willem Grooters — Thu, 20 Nov 2003 04:08:32 GMT

Henk and Buenaventura: this was the best hint.
The machine was set to FastFD - and the (Catalist 6000) switches are set to Auto-negotiate. You shoudl think there would be no problem - were it not for the UTP cables; although CAT6, still UNshielded.
The network guy over here told me there had been trouble with some PC's due to interference of some sort, and switching to HD prevented these.
Since large data-transfer will not be common (to or from this machine) I don't think switching to HalfDuplex would cause a problem. So I set the NIC to Fast, and yes, the problem is over.

Still, the installation of patches is still to be considered. I leave that to the sysmgr himself ;-) I'm just the substitute (they can't do without...)

Points have been granted. Thanks.

Re: URGENT: FTP problem

Mike Naime — Thu, 20 Nov 2003 22:07:56 GMT

So this was really a NETWORK issue, and not a VMS/Alphaserver issue. I'm not really surprised. We learned years ago that Auto-negotiate doesn't. Just wait until the Cisco switch crashes, and then some of your VMS systems will be able to talk, and some of them will never talk until you re-boot the VMS box! Back in 2001, we had a core switch fail. It took out 1/2 of our VMS systems. When they network switch came back up, all but 6 of our VMS servers had a functioning network connection. We tried the cable connections. (Link lights showed up, but no connectivity) We tried stopping and starting TCPIP services on the VMS box. No success until we booted the VMS server.

Now we know that if a Cisco switch crashes, we may need to re-boot our servers to get the Cisco switch to acknowledge that something is connected to it. (Piece of junk network equipment.)