LANCP Unavailable station buffers

[Roger Grauwmeijer]

We back up our systems using Legato and seen to get inconsistent falures (excess retries) from time to time. Legato have suggested it is a network problem so we started looking at LANCP counters. There are a large number of "Unavailable station buffers" which appear on the failing system and not on others. The system in question is an Alphaserver DS10 running VMS 7.3-2. We suspect there may be a link. Anyone have any ideas?

[John Gillings]

Roger,

First thing to check is for a duplex mismatch. Ensure the Alpha console has the network device set to match the hub or switch it's connected to. I recommend both be set to "auto".

Use SDA> SHOW LAN to determine which protocol(s) are having problems. How you allocate resources is protocol specific. Also try to determine if there are specific events which result in counters increasing.

[Volker Halle]

Roger,

as John already said, please first make sure that the communication with the switch is error-free. There should be no errors/failures shown with LANCP SHOW DEV/COUNT

Once this is the case, try to determine, at which time the "Unavailable station buffers" are increasing. Write a little batch job to watch these counters. If they don't increase while you're running your backup via Legato and you still get an error in Legato, you've shown, that those two events may NOT be related.

You can also use SDA> SHOW LAN/FULL and look at the 'rcv buffers' information of the affected LAN interface.

If the counters are increasing while you are running your Legato backup, consider to increase the buffers using LANCP SET DEV/MIN_BUFFERS and/or /MAX_BUFFERS

Unavailable Station Buffer (USB) events - as opposed to Unavailable User Buffers (UUB) - are not protocol-related, they effect the LAN interface itself.

Volker.

[Mike Reznak]

Hi,

an hint for station buffers

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/73final/6548/6548_cpro_007.html
look for
C.1.1 Line Receive Buffers/Station Buffers

[Roger Grauwmeijer]

I have just this morning set the ewa0_mode to FASTFD (along with the switch port). We had problems with autonegotiate on this system some time ago but then we saw Unmatched Fram Errors and our network kit has changed since then. Looking through FAQs, we may have one of those D500 interfaces that doesn't autonegotiate.
I'll monitor and see how we go.

[Jan van den Ende]

Roger,

from your Forum Profile:


I have assigned points to 0 of 14 responses to my questions.

Some of those are already quite old.

Maybe you can find some time to do some assigning?

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/helptips.do?#33

Mind, I do NOT say you necessarily need to give lots of points. It is fully up to _YOU_ to decide how many. If you consider an answer is not deserving any points, you can also assign 0 ( = zero ) points, and then that answer will no longer be counted as unassigned.
Consider, that every poster took at least the trouble of posting for you!

To easily find your streams with unassigned points, click your own name somewhere.
This will bring up your profile.
Near the bottom of that page, under the caption â My Question(s)â you will find â questions or topics with unassigned points â Clicking that will give all, and only, your questions that still have unassigned postings.

Thanks on behalf of your Forum colleagues.

PS. â nothing personal in this. I try to post it to everyone with this kind of assignment ratio in this forum. If you have received a posting like this before â please do not take offence â none is intended!

Proost.

Have one on me.

jpe