Environment
Novell Open Enterprise Server (NetWare based)
Novell NetWare 6.5 Support Pack 6
Novell NetWare Remote Manager
Situation
After upgrading to NetWare 6.5 SP6 the server stops
communicating after a few days.
Server is running out of packet receive buffers.
Resolution
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and documented in the wsock6l.zip patch (superceded by wsock6m.zip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.
Additional Information
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).