Dear managers,
We have an application that runs on an FDDI network of 10 machines with DEFPA 100Mbit cards and DECconcentrators 900FH.
Each five of which are normally connected redundantly to two concentrators, but at the moment all 10 are connected to a single concentrator.
Occasionally, we experience temporary failures of the FDDI interface on at least one of the machines such as the following:
Aug 11 09:52:47 FSMS1 vmunix: fta0: Link Unavailable.
Aug 11 09:52:48 FSMS1 vmunix: fta0: Link Available.
We have had our application crash because of this, and I am trying to find out the origin of this problem.
One of the unused M-ports of the concentrator shows up a solid amber LED. I believe this indicates a fault condition, since the ports are supposed to be green or green/amber alternating in normal operation. However, all the in-use ports look ok according to LEDs (green).
Next, I looked at the output of 'netstat -I fta0 -s' from the various machines (see below).
It seems that all the FDDI counters were cleared at roughly the same time, and there are no frame errors or other suspicious events in the output other than ring reinitializations. For those, I noticed that although the counting duration is much the same, the number of received ring reinitializations varies from machine to machine, in the range from 1-197+ . None of the interfaces claim to have initiated a ring reinitialization.
Does this mean I should investigate the concentrator?
Where does the uneven distribution of received reinitializations come from?
I would very much appreciate any information someone might have on this or similar problems with their FDDI.
Kind regards,
Michael Bütow
-------------------------------------------------
RB1
29736 seconds since last zeroed
61 ring reinitialization received
0 ring reinitialization initiated
RB2
29736 seconds since last zeroed
59 ring reinitialization received
0 ring reinitialization initiated
DAS1
29737 seconds since last zeroed
197 ring reinitialization received
0 ring reinitialization initiated
DAS2
29737 seconds since last zeroed
77 ring reinitialization received
0 ring reinitialization initiated
SMS1
29737 seconds since last zeroed
8 ring reinitialization received
0 ring reinitialization initiated
SMS2
29738 seconds since last zeroed
6 ring reinitialization received
0 ring reinitialization initiated
SS1
29738 seconds since last zeroed
147 ring reinitialization received
0 ring reinitialization initiated
SS2
29738 seconds since last zeroed
83 ring reinitialization received
0 ring reinitialization initiated
TS1
29738 seconds since last zeroed
1 ring reinitialization received
0 ring reinitialization initiated
TS2
29738 seconds since last zeroed
21 ring reinitialization received
0 ring reinitialization initiated
Received on Mon Aug 11 2003 - 11:34:09 NZST