Subject: frozen ipf firewall
To: None <tech-net@netbsd.org>
From: Patrick Welche <prlw1@newn.cam.ac.uk>
List: tech-net
Date: 08/11/2005 17:37:43
Sometime between 4.05 and 4.11 a i386 box running 20 July 3.99.7 code
simply froze - no (usb) keyboard response. messages just says:

Aug 11 04:00:00 ipf syslogd: restart
Aug 11 09:45:48 ipf syslogd: restart
Aug 11 09:45:48 ipf /netbsd: Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005

so it's rather hard to figure out what happened, and the kernel has
neither DIAGNOSTIC nor DEBUG defined. (It does have both ipfilter and pf.)

All this box does is copy packets between 2 ex(4) cards via ipf. It had
finished "daily" by then, and I can't think of anything in particular
which happens at that time of night.

I would guess "cheap Dell failure" but for the fact that I saw the same
freezes on another box, the difference being that this time the entire
NetBSD system isn't contained on a single floppy, so one might be able
to find out what is going.

The question really is, what should I be logging to find out?

It was up for 8 days. Does this seem sensible?

kern.mbuf.msize = 256
kern.mbuf.mclbytes = 2048
kern.mbuf.nmbclusters = 2048

(after only 7:40 hours)
260 mbufs in use:
        258 mbufs allocated to data
        2 mbufs allocated to packet headers
0 calls to protocol drain routines

State table bucket statistics:
        368 in use      
        6.41% bucket usage
        0 minimal length
        3 maximal length
        1.068 average length

Name  Mtu   Network    Address              Ipkts Ierrs    Opkts Oerrs Colls
ex0   1500  <Link>     00:50:da:35:d4:a1   957124     0   930663     0     0
ex1   1500  <Link>     00:50:da:35:d9:36   986121     1   927131     0  1466

Hmm.. 1 Ierrs, 1466 Colls, though the count isn't changing..

Thoughts?

Cheers,

Patrick