Re: IP Background

["Eric S. Crawley" <Crawley@alderaan.scrc.symbolics.com>]

In some ways, IP Background is the culprit but I think there are other
problems that are causing the behavior that Juergen is seeing.  IP
background runs every minute to check to see if all of your gateways and
IP routes are still valid.  It has little to do with keeping connections
alive.  That is handled by the process TCP background.  In the process
of validating the routes and gateways, IP Background can do namespace
queries over chaos.  Since this is happening every time IP background is
run on the other machines, I suspect that somehow the namespace
information on the other machines is sorely out of date and they are
trying to get updates each time IP Background is run.  Either that or
they are running with neti:*validate-once-per-boot* set to NIL so they
try to validate the namespace information every time they touch a
namespace object.  The complete but possibly time-consuming solution to
the problem is to build new worlds from distribution worlds starting
with the world on the primary namespace server so everyone's namespace
information is up to date from the start.  You might look at some of the
namespace maintenance documentation in book 9 for other suggestions.
(There isn't much there but it can give you some hints).

As far as increasing TCP:*BACKGROUND-INTERVAL*, you can if you have one
or no gateways and the gateway is very reliable.  IP Background is used
mostly to change IP routes when gateways come up and down.