innd lockup

[Eric Houby]

I had the same problem occur last week for the first, and
hopefully the only time, on a compaq DS20 running DEC OSF 4.0. 
After the reboot I tried to mount the file system containing the
spool files but mount complained of a dirty file system.  fsck
reported no problems and after running it the file system mounted
with no problems.  Sounds even less likely to be an OS problem. 
BTW I'm using CNFS.

Eric

Fletcher Mattox wrote:
> 
> Just for the record, I just experienced this problem under Solaris 7.
> I had seen it fairly frequently on earlier versions of Solaris, but hadn't
> seen it since putting up Solaris 7 last summer.  So I assumed that it was
> an OS bug, too.  This belief was supported by the fact that every process
> (not just innd) which tried to access the disk became similarly stuck.
> However, this time, only innd was stuck.  I/O to the disk by other
> processes worked just fine.  If I had to bet, I'd probably still put
> my money on an OS bug.  But my most recent experience has shaken that
> belief a little.
> 
> This is a nearly impossible problem to debug, because you can't
> ptrace(2) the process once it gets in this state, so debuggers
> and truss won't work.  I was able to one line out of /usr/proc/bin/pstack,
> which indicated innd was inside write(2).  Duh.