179623 connect requests dropped due to no listener

[lastgreatone]

The Oracle dba asked me if there were networking problem since the requests he was running were unusually slow. I ran netstat with various options and the above line in my subject concerns me, should I be? We later found out that the Oracle error message: The fork function failed: too many processes exists, were actually due to orphan Oracle processes that were hung. He now runs a script to purge this on a regular basis.

Francoise

[Lasse Knudsen]

"connections dropped due to no listener" means that some process in the network tried to contact your server on a port that no process was listening to. This could be because of somebody running a portscanner against your machine or maybe you have disabled a service that somebody expects your server to be running. Eg. the ident/auth daemon could quite commonly be such an example.

In order to find out more you need to have a packet sniffer running (or maybe configuring the Nettl)