Re: {bb} BB-Network Issue

[David Pullman <dpullman@cme.nist.gov>]

Lars,

I was going to post what I found separately but there is a remote chance 
that it may be what you are seeing.

I updated from bbgen 2.x to 3.0 recently.  We only do fping tests for 
conn on a bunch of hosts.  I was actually migrating the configuration 
from one set of bb machines to a new more distributed configuration so I 
had a chance to run the existing system and the new installation.

We started seeing a couple of hosts going from green to red to green in 
a consistent pattern for serveral hours.  In other words, two hosts 
would start oscillating from red to green and back, over and over.  Then 
after a couple of hours maybe two other hosts would do this and the 
first two would stay green.  The original bbgen 2.x system showed only 
green.

We found after turning on debug and looking at the tmp files for fping 
that the fping output was being corrupted by stderr output in the middle 
of the stdout results.  It was sort of hapenstance which hosts would get 
corrupted, more or less how far down the list of hosts to ping it was. 
The fping tmp file would show the start of a host ping, and right about 
then before it had a result the fping would dump the timed out stderr 
result in the middle of that line and for a couple of dozen lines.  Then 
finally the good result for the host line came in and then it went on 
from there.

We looked at the source code and found that there was a change in the 
way fping was called (using execlp) and it put stderr and stdout into 
the same result.  Hence the corruption of the result at about the same 
host test over and over.  Strange looking until you find it in the debug 
tmp files.

We put a wrapper around fping to redirect stderr so it would stop doing 
this rather than messing with the source:

#!/bin/sh

exec /usr/local/sbin/fping "$@" 2>/dev/null

Again, I found this and was going to post it but just on the remote 
chance that it may be the same for you.

Our bbnet machine is running Fedora 2, pretty standard installation.

--
David Pullman
MEL Systems Administration
NIST

Lars Sjödin wrote:
> After upgrading to bbgen 3.0 i have been getting the same effect.
>
> reports on "conn" failing on several switches, even though i have a
> secondary machine pinging it from the same net and its working, its also
> responds from the BB machine if i ssh into it and try a ping.
>
> Very odd... anyone else got this thing?
>
> With regards,
>
> Lars Sjödin
> Network Administrator
>
> company: Sundsvall Energi Elnät AB
> department: ServaNet
> location: Sundsvall / Sweden
>
> www: http://www.sundsvallenergielnat.com/
>      http://www.serva.net/
>
> call: Office +46 (0) 60 600 50 76
>       Cell +46 (0) 70 328 02 46
>       Fax +46 (0) 60 600 50 01
>
> On Fri, 1 Oct 2004, Bell, Ray wrote:
>
>
> > I have been getting e-mail and pages from stmp, telnet, ssh, conn and
> > ftp which are all running OK and there is no problem.   Seven of the
> > servers that are on different network than my other 40 servers are
> > constantly sending pages and e-mail every 30 minutes.    There is no
> > problem so why is it's constant sending e-mail and pages?    I'm just
> > trying to figure out what do I need to do.  Management is riding me to
> > get an answer to this problem.    I stop and restart bb and still the
> > problem exists.   I'm running 1.9C.    Is there a bug in the code for
> > that version or should I upgrade bb to a new version.
> >
> > Ray A Bell
> > AAA Application Support Services
> > rbell@national.aaa.com
> > 407/444-7857
>
>
>
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