Original post:
> This is about process accounting problems on DMS clients, so if you
> have no knowledge nor interest, feel free to delete this one.
<snip...>
> We have DEC Alphas in a DMS (Dataless Management Services) environment
> with the DMS server running 4.0D, patch level 3 and all 9 clients (save
> one) running 4.0E, no patch level. The DMS client disk areas are AdvFS.
>
> Accounting is turned on and setup everywhere per chap. 12 of the ver. 4.0
> System Administration book. It all seems to work just fine on the DMS server,
> but historically, the DMS clients (even under earlier 4.0 versions) have
> had very weird problems. Things like nothing seemingly getting written
> to the pacct file after the nitely runacct unless one "primes" it by
> issuing an accounting command, like 'sa' or 'acctcms'. Also, there are
> sometimes hundreds of bizarre entries under "COMMAND NAME" in the reports.
> Entires like |?? or :?? with impossible "TOTAL CPU-MIN". Impossible
> because they all exceed the "TOTAL REAL-MIN", which is always 0 for these
> non-commands.
<snip...>
"Dr. Tom Blinn, 603-884-0646" wrote:
> This all sounds really familiar -- we (myself and I believe the product mgr
> for the DMS software) had a discussion about how the accounting daemon won't
> write accounting records to an NFS mounted file system -- at least, that's my
> recollection of the root cause of the problem. I'd have to dig back through
> my mail to see if I could find it. It might be something our qual team turned
> up recently, too. I just can't recall the context.
>
> As far as we could tell, it's been that way since day 1 -- that is, this is
> something that has NEVER worked on DMS clients. I don't remember all of the
> details, but it had something to do with the way you invoke the accounting
> software, and it was subtle..
>
> There may well be NO actual fix, except to run with a local disk for the file
> system that's got the file in it, and that my not be an acceptable solution.
>
> We didn't really think through all the scenarios for how you might be able to
> work around it.
>
> Tom
Well, the workaround was to put the pacct and qacct (tho I've never seen
anything written to the qacct file) onto local disk space - i.e., local
to each DMS client. Fortunately, all our DMS clients have local disk, tho
it had been exclusively assigned to swap before. A little reallocating
of the space and a couple of links in /var/adm as indicated on the next lines:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root adm 25 Apr 14 08:38 pacct -> /var/adm/acct/local/pacct
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root adm 25 Apr 14 08:44 qacct -> /var/adm/acct/local/qacct
and a bit of tweaking of the turnacct script so it doesn't blow away the
links every nite, and it all works correctly now.
Thanks a great deal to Tom and his suspicions about the accounting daemon
and NFS mounts!
- Larry
P. Larry Nelson (217-244-9855) | Systems/Network Administrator
461 Loomis Lab | U of I, CCSO Departmental User Services
1110 W. Green St., Urbana, IL | Consultant to: High Energy Physics Group
MailTo:lnelson_at_uiuc.edu |
http://www.uiuc.edu/ph/www/lnelson
Received on Tue Apr 20 1999 - 16:29:39 NZST