UNC Linux Users Group

[James Jordan <jwjordan AT bme.unc.edu>]

Unfortunately, I am using NFS to mount /var/spool/mail among other 
directories. I don't see a way that I could disable NFS without breaking 
many services (Sendmail and Amanda being the two most important). 
Following your lead, I checked out Google groups and read the 
suggestions. I tried running tcpdump on the ports listed by "rpcinfo -p" 
looking for errors, but I've yet to see any. At the suggestion of Ben 
Aycock in OIS, I wrote a little Perl script to keep a minute-by-minute 
log of the output of "ps auxw" which clears every hour. Hopefully 
this'll give me a better idea of what is happening when the system 
crashes next (I'm sure I won't have to wait long!). James Jordan wrote:

> > I have an unstable RedHat 9 machine acting as my department's primary 
> > mail server and DNS server.  Obviously, having this machine crash on a 
> > *weekly* basis is unacceptable, and I'm at my wits end trying to figure 
> > this one out.  I notice that while no log shows any kinds of errors 
> > (that I can find that is), the console occasionally shows this error: 
> > "svc: short len 2, dropping request".  Suffice it to say, I have no idea 
> > what this means, and Google didn't help.  Does anyone have any idea 
> > where I should start, or something specific to look for?  I can say that 
> > all this instability seems to have started (though I can be 100% sure) 
> > with the replacement of the hard drive after a HD failure.  However, I 
> > have run hdparm with numerous options trying to rule out hardware 
> > problems, and I haven't seen any errors thus far.  I am running the 
> > latest kernel before RedHat moved to EL.  Thanks for any light you can 
> > shed on this!
>  

Looking through Google Groups I see some folks mentioning this exact 
error as an issue with NFS.  Are you running any NFS services?

Jeff



--
James Jordan
Systems Administrator
UNC Chapel Hill Dept. of Biomedical Engineering
919-966-8077
jwjordan AT bme.unc.edu