Connectivity problems With IBM

[jim frost]

In article <6101 at hub.ucsb.edu> erickson at pollux.ncgia.ucsb.edu (Scott Erickson) writes:
>I find that (on IBM RT's, PS/2's, and RS6000's) IBM tends to make
>their software so that it's easy to connect with other IBM machines,
>but it's extremely painful to connect to anything else!

We ran into a neat one yesterday.  If your root shell is /bin/ksh (the
default) and a user's home directory is NFS mounted (most of our users
are on a Sun-4/330 under 4.0.3c) and the user "su"'s to root, ksh will
start making tons of NFS requests across the network.  It will flood
the network, thus inhibiting everyone's communication, and bring the
foreign server to its knees (biod's will be running all-out).

Killing the ksh process started by "su" causes the problem to go away.
Changing the root shell to /bin/csh eliminates it entirely.

This problem exists under 9021F with the 3001 update installed.  We
never noticed it before the 3001 update so I believe the update caused
the problem (might be wrong though).

This problem has been reported to IBM.

Informationally yours,

jim frost
saber software
jimf at saber.com