ECB leak when using RSS Feed Groups in NRM.

After upgrading to NetWare 6.5 SP6 the server stops communicating after a few days.

Server is running out of packet receive buffers.

Workaround Solution:

1. You can disable the RSS feed groups through NRM or by simply deleting the group information in the SYS:\LOGIN\RSS\*.* and SYS:\LOGIN\RSSGROUPS\*.* directories and reboot the server. This will prevent the ECB leak from occurring until you can patch the server to NetWare 6.5 Support Pack 7.

Fix:

This was a two part fix. 1. Some changes had to be made in winsock in the ICMP ping reply code path. This was fixed and documented in the wsock6l.zip patch (superceded by wsock6m.zip patch). 2. Changes were made inside HTTPSTK.NLM which can be made available for SP6 servers but is included with NetWare 6.5 Support Pack 7 release. Note: Both the Winsock and HTTPSTK.NLM fixes are found in Support pack 7.

There is a new feature added in NetWare 6.5 Support Pack 6 in Novell NetWare Remote Manager (NRM) that allows you to setup RSS feed groups to monitor the health of your server. When using the Ping status and selecting multiple servers the ICMP reply packet would not get cleaned up thus leaking an ECB on the server. Depending how many servers you have selected and how often you are pinging the status of these servers and what the Maximum Packet Receive Buffers setting is, depends on how long the server will stay up and communicating. This could range from days to months.

Note: There was another ECB leak issue seen in NetWare 6.5 SP6 servers which was addressed in a newer BSDSOCK.NLM (Post SP6).