Environment
Novell NetWare 6.5 Support Pack 8
SYS Volume is Legacy / Traditional file system
Situation
After upgrading to NetWare 6.5 Service Pack 8 the server abends
upon boot-up.
Server continually reboots itself during boot-up caused by
multiple abends occurring.
Resolution
Workaround:
1. Manually set NSS cache using the C:\NWSERVER\NSSSTART.CFG
file with the following settings.
/nocachebalance
/minbuffercachesize=10000 (this number will depend on
how many 4 KB buffers you want to allocate to NSS
cache)
2. Eliminate the NDS cache file
(SYS:\_NETWARE\_NDSDB.INI) and allow NDS cache to dynamically
allocate cache.
Fix:
Fixed in a SERVER.EXE (Server Version 5.70.08 August 21,
2009) which can be obtained from Novell Technical Support.
Additional Information
Troubleshooting information:
Abend.log call stack:MMCacheWriteCompleteServiceRoutine
MM.NLM|MM_CompleteMessage
MM.NLM|UpdateIOStatsCallback
Noticed from coredump that NSS would flush it's cache right
before the abend.
Customers who have seen this during boot-up have all had SYS
Volumes which are Legacy traditional file system and not NSS.
Customers will also have the NDS cache set to preallocate
cache. This is found in
the SYS:\_NETWARE\_NDSDB.INI file.
Example of SYS:\_NETWARE\_NDSDB.INI
blockcachepercent=40
cachecleanupinterval=60
cacheadjustinterval=60
maxdirtycache=60000000
cache=700000000
preallocatecache=true