[Info-vax] startup hangs during TCPIP

[Neil Rieck]

On Sunday, May 17, 2015 at 6:21:36 AM UTC-4, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> I have a satellite which I boot every day or two.  A couple of days ago,
> the startup started hanging.  STARTUP.LOG and console output indicate
> that this is always somewhere in the TCPIP startup.  Control-P and 
> booting again was successful, though in one of three or four times I had 
> to do it twice.
> 
> No, I haven't changed anything.  This is still a 7.3-2 node.
> 
> Once it boots up, everything is fine.
> 
> Something I noticed around the same time, which wasn't present before,
> is that a Smart-Array card (which I have never used) now fails to 
> initialize, but I don't see how that could be relevant.
> 
> Also, during the startup I mount the system-disk shadow sets on other 
> boot nodes.  The first one mounts, the second one doesn't, and no other 
> shadow sets after the second system-disk one mount either.  (Of course, 
> its own system disk is mounted.)  Strange, but again I don't see how it 
> could be related.
> 
> All network is on the LAN (100 Mb/s, full duplex) and I don't see any 
> other problems with it.
> 
> Any ideas?

I have been seeing this as well on an AS-DS20e running OpenVMS-8.4 with TCPIP 5.7
 
It was working properly for almost a year (proactive reboot every 8-weeks) until the machine on the public internet started acting up (delay on reboot) while an identical machine on the corporate network never experienced the problem.
 
Since this machine still had TCPware installed I rebooted using that stack and the delay immediately disappeared (tried several reboots) so it is definitely a problem with TCPIP. For my next step, I went back to TCPIP but moved the startup to batch queue. Since then I noticed the delay is almost exactly 10-minutes or 20-minutes which I find very suspicious.
 
Further investigation showed that the public port was setup as auto-speed but the corporate port was set as fixed speed. So I contacted the internet service provider and had them set the port speed of the Cisco-800 to fixed and the problem went away.

p.s. perhaps I should try a reboot tonight to make sure the problem is truly resolved.
 
Neil Rieck
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.