Inbound discards

[Ngoh Chean Siung]

Hi,

I hv 2 HP servers (RP7410 and RP5470).

For the RP5470 server,
Inbound Discards = 2528
Inbound Errors = 0
Outbound Discards = 0
Outbound Errors = 0

For the RP7410 server,
Inbound Discards = 0
Inbound Errors = 0
Outbound Discards = 0
Outbound Errors = 0

1) What is inbound & outbound stands for?
2) Why the inbound discards for RP5470 hv value? Any impact? Is my server intruded by someone?

regards.

[harry d brown jr]

Inbound = packets coming to your server
outbound = packets being sent somewhere else

http://www.interex.org/pubcontent/enterprise/nov01/grumann.jsp

live free or die
harry d brown jr

[Ron Kinner]

I don't think you are under attack but you may have a duplex mismatch. (Believe some versions of Lanadmin need a patch to correctly show Inbound errors.) Did you check the second page of the display for errors? Are you seeing a large number of FCS errors? That would indicate you have the server set to use 100 Full but the switch port is set to 100 Half or to Autonegotiate which results in the same thing.

Main thing you would notice if this were the case is a marked difference in the time it would take to receive a large file versus the time to send.

Ron

[Ron Kinner]

One other possiblity just came to mind. Could be that the switch is sick and is sending a lot of packets to the server that don't belong to it or that the switch is dumb hub and not a switch.

Ron

[Ngoh Chean Siung]

Hi,

The lanadmin info is shown as below

PPA Number = 0
Description = lan0 Hewlett-Packard 10/100 TX Full-Duplex TT = 1500
Type (value) = ethernet-csmacd(6)
MTU Size = 1500
Speed = 100000000
Station Address =
Administration Status (value) = up(1)
Operation Status (value) = up(1)
Last Change = 763
Inbound Octets = 763185386
Inbound Unicast Packets = 7915232
Inbound Non-Unicast Packets = 256905
Inbound Discards = 3158
Inbound Errors = 0
Inbound Unknown Protocols = 206821
Outbound Octets = 1754605310
Outbound Unicast Packets = 9645741
Outbound Non-Unicast Packets = 3158
Outbound Discards = 0
Outbound Errors = 0
Outbound Queue Length = 0
Specific = 655367

Press to continue


Ethernet-like Statistics Group

Index = 1
Alignment Errors = 0
FCS Errors = 0
Single Collision Frames = 0
Multiple Collision Frames = 0
Deferred Transmissions = 0
Late Collisions = 0
Excessive Collisions = 0
Internal MAC Transmit Errors = 0
Carrier Sense Errors = 0
Frames Too Long = 0
Internal MAC Receive Errors = 0

Actually we faced lost connection from this server if we telnet to this server at different subnet. The server will auto kick off all the users that connected to it. Even the ping output also show "request time out" at that time. This scenario happens less than 10 times per day.

Things that we already done:
1) Change a new switch
2) Change a new UTP cable
3) Change a new NIC

But this problem still persists.

Any advise?

regards.

[Todd Whitcher]

Ngoh,

If you are running 11.11 on the RP you may have a known statistical error w/ lanadmin. I think your more pressing issue is why you cant connect from other subnets. Are you saying you can always connect from the local network but fail from remote subnets? If so I would suggest a network trace when that error condition occurs on the source and destination.

If you have this patch
Summary : in some cases inbound discards are not updated correctly. You will see this with :
11.0 PHNE_26250 or later
11.11 PHNE_25388 or later

You may be seeing bogus inbound discards.

To answer your original question:
INBOUND DISCARDS:
The number of inbound packets that were discarded even though no inbound errors had been detected, to prevent them being delivered to a higher-layer protocol. One possible reason for discarding such a packet could be out of receive buffers.

These packets can be discarded by :

-the card/driver
-DLPI

If it's discarded by the card/driver this usually indicate that the interface/system has more traffic than it can handle.

You may want to patch driver for the latest version.

Can you run:
ioscan -kfnC lan and post the output?

Then do a what on the kernel for the driver your using and post that.

what /stand/vmunix |grep -i driver_from_ioscan

[Ngoh Chean Siung]

Hi,

# ioscan -kfnC lan
Class I H/W Path Driver S/W State H/W Type Description
===================================================================
lan 0 0/0/0/0 btlan3 CLAIMED INTERFACE HP PCI 10/100Base-TX Core
/dev/diag/lan0 /dev/ether0

No output for # what /stand/vmunix |grep -i driver_from_ioscan

FYI, my HP server version is 11.0 with 64bits.

Actually my problem is different subnet pc still can connect to the server, but there are a few, these different subnet pc seem lost connection to the server and auto logout. I just wonder what is the possible cause for this scenario.

We hv scheduled our another server which is at different subnet to do PING every minute and found that sometime the PING output show "Request timeout".

regards.

[N.S. Sundar]

Hi, do you have the latest Transport patches? You could do:
$ what /usr/conf/lib/libinet.a
and see if the version referred there has been superseded by a later patch.

[Todd Whitcher]

Hello,

For the what oupput you would have replaced
driver_from_ioscan with btlan3. Your using the built in 100BaseT PCI lan card which uses the lan driver btlan3.

I reviewed the latest patches for that interface.

You would want to check for these patches and update if you do not have them.

PHNE_25907 Built In PCI 100Base Patch
PHNE_25580 Lan Cumulative Patch
PHNE_26293 PCI 100Base Cumulative patch
PHNE_32041 ARPA Cumulative

Along w/ any dependencies.

On a HPUX system there are not any network settings that would cause an ESTABLISHED network connection to auto-logout. There are shell variables that will autologout ESTABLISHED connections. You should check the shell variables for the users who are being auto-logged out to see if there are any settings that would cause that. Also, you should check your upper layer settings on the network devices between the PC's and the HPUX system to see if they have any timeout variables set to auto-logout connections.

For the Shells:

C-SHELL (/bin/csh)

In the HP-UX environment, the C Shell has an automatic logout feature, which automatically logs the user out of their session after one hour of inactivity.

This feature can be overwritten either locally (for a single-user) or globally (for all users):

LOCALLY: Set the following resource line in the user's $HOME/.cshrc file:

set autologout = 0

NOTE: Setting the autologout resource to 0 will set the effective timeout to infinity; forcing the window to stay up as long as the user is logged in.

GLOBALLY: Set the following resource line in the system-wide /etc/csh.login file:

set autologout = 120

NOTE: Setting the autologout resource to 120 will set the effective timeout to 2 hours (or 120 minutes).

NOTE: The autologout resource in the C Shell is set in minutes. Any number of minutes can be specified to this resource's value.

KORN SHELL (/bin/ksh)

In the HP-UX environment, the Korn Shell has a timeout feature called TMOUT. Therefore, if windows are disappearing in your user's Korn Shell environment, you may want to use the env command to look at the environment variable set for this user:

/usr/bin/env

If the TMOUT= environment variable is set to any value greater than 0, the Korn Shell windows will timeout at this specified time.

This feature can be set either locally (for a single-user) or globally (for all users):

LOCALLY: Set the following resource line in the user's $HOME/.profile file:

TMOUT=0

NOTE: Setting the autologout resource to 0 will set the effective timeout to infinity; forcing the window to stay up as long as the user is logged in.

GLOBALLY: Set the following resource line in the system-wide /etc/profile file:

TMOUT=3600

NOTE: Setting the autologout resource to 3600 will set the effective timeout to 1 hour (or 3600 seconds).

NOTE: The TMOUT resource in the Korn Shell is set in seconds. Any number of seconds can be specified to this resource's value.


If your using other shells check their man pages for automatic logout settings.

ex.

csh(1) C Shell (/usr/bin/csh) description.
sh-bourne(1) Bourne Shell (/usr/old/bin/sh) description.
ksh(1) Korn Shell (/usr/bin/ksh) description.
sh-posix(1) POSIX Shell (/usr/bin/sh) description