TCP connections

[maglio@cogsci.ucsd.edu (Paul Maglio)]

    Date: Mon, 2 Mar 1992 11:34 PST
    From: klehr@sunspot.ece.clarkson.edu (Thomas J. Klehr)

    I find that running our Symbolics 3670 with Genera 8.0 for an extended
    period of time without warm-booting it causes a buildup of TCP
    connections; these are shown in Peek.  Is there a patch to get rid of
    old connections that are no longer in use?

    I could reset the network and re-enable it as part of the
    logout-initialization-list, but I'd rather have it as part of the
    connection system.

    Thanks.

    Tom (klehr@sun.soe.clarkson.edu)

If you mean that when you have FTP connections open over TCP to
a SUN (running 4.0 something), the sun side times out and gets
stuck in the dreaded FIN_WAIT_2 state (use netstat -a on the SUN
to find this out), and the lispm waits forever in a CLOSE-WAIT
state, then, yes, I have seen it.  I used to build up so many of
these that I would often run out of network buffers.   In a
lengthy discussion with Symbolics software support, they
convinced me that it is a bug in how SUN's the ftp server times
out.  Still, it was so irritating that I hacked a workaround on
the lispm side that occasionally checks for these CLOSE-WAIT
connections and forcibly closes them.  Software support,
however, does not abide my fix as it uses undocumented internal
functions.  For me, this is no longer a big problem as I've been
using NFS since it came bundled in 8.1, but I'd be happy to send
you the code.

-Paul