SUMMARY: Inaccessible Subsystem?

Thanks to William Hathaway and Al Hopper for their helpful suggestions, quoted
below.

It turns out the problem was the Navisphere software which was running at boot
in order to support an EMC Clariion device that was attached to the system at
one time.  Stopping the processes resolved the issue of the email flood.

> From: William Hathaway
>
> Hi Brian,
>   I've never seen a problem like what you are mentioning, but
> thought if
> you are having trouble finding what is generating the messages,
> determining the parent process that is calling sendmail may help.
> I've done things like the following before:
>
> 1) move sendmail to a new location sendmail.orig
>
> 2) create a wrapper script for sendmail that looks like
>    #!/bin/ksh
>    # log parent process id,date, and arguments
>    echo "called by $PPID at `date` with args $*" >>
> /var/tmp/sendmail_debug.log
>
>    # log information about parent process
>    echo "parent info =`ps -fp $PPID`" >> /var/tmp/sendmail_debug.log
>
>    # launch the original sendmail executable through exec
>    exec /usr/lib/sendmail.orig $*



> From: Al Hopper
>
> A search of docs.sun.com reveals this string in:
>
> Sun StorEdge A7000 Remote Dual Copy System Administrator's Guide
>
> Is there an A7000 connected to the system?
>
> Al Hopper  Logical Approach Inc, Plano, TX.  al@logical-approach.com
>            Voice: 972.379.2133 Fax: 972.379.2134
> http://www.save-solaris-x86.org/





> -----Original Message-----
> From: Pardy, Brian
> Sent: Wednesday, July 10, 2002 10:33 AM
> To: sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
> Subject: Inaccessible Subsystem?
>
>
> Hello, gurus...
>
> I've got an E6500 here running Solaris 7 that has been having
> some very
> strange issues lately.  It happened about a month ago and
> resolved itself
> without intervention, but now that it is happening again I
> would like to
> figure out the actual problem.
>
> The symptoms:
>
> Every 15-30min, we get a sudden burst of a couple hundred
> emails sent to root
> that look like:
>
> > From root Wed Jul 10 10:10:34 2002
> > Return-Path: <root>
> > Received: (from root@localhost)
> > 	by denali.curagen.com (8.10.2+Sun/8.10.2) id g6AEAY107658
> > 	for root; Wed, 10 Jul 2002 10:10:34 -0400 (EDT)
> > Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2002 10:10:34 -0400 (EDT)
> > From: Super-User <root>
> > Message-Id: <200207101410.g6AEAY107658@denali.curagen.com>
> > Content-Length: 78
> >
> >  Unknown
> >  c04
> >  Inaccessible Subsystem, Check cable connections on host denali
>
> In and of itself, this isn't much more than an annoyance, but
> each time this
> happens sendmail manages to get into a massive
> lock-contention fight between
> several hundred copies of mail.local and sendmail trying to write to
> /var/mail/root and /var/mail/root.lock (as seen through truss).
>
> I don't see anything particularly relevant in
> /var/adm/messages (except for
> more than a few SYSERR(root)'s complaining about "No child
> processes" due to
> the fact that there are ~400 sendmails or mail.locals running).
>
> Sendmail is the only mail software running on this machine,
> and it's not
> running as a daemon (or out of inetd.conf -- this system does
> not receive
> mail).  /var/mail is on a local partition, so there shouldn't
> be any NFS
> issues.
>
> I've investigated on Google and SunSolve, and found one other
> report[0] of a
> similar problem when a lot of email arrived simultaneously
> for a single user,
> but haven't seen anything reported as a resolution.  The
> suggestions to the
> prior report (which was on Sun-Managers) were to replace
> mail.local with
> procmail, or re-configure sendmail to monitor load averages
> and/or only
> deliver to local users through crontab'd queue delivery runs.
>  Haven't tried
> these yet, as they would likely only band-aid the symptom and
> not fix the
> actual problem.
>
> So, does anyone know where this "Inaccessible Subsystem"
> alert is coming from?
> I've run strings on just about everything in /kernel looking
> for it, and just
> can't seem to locate it.
>
> (Yes, we have checked our cable connections and they all
> appear fine.  Someone
> else on site remarked that the Ethernet cable (homemade)
> looked a little
> flaky, but my feeling is that if it were indeed an Ethernet
> issue I wouldn't
> be able to telnet into the system at all on this, the only interface.)
>
> I will happily summarize, and appreciate any help that can be
> provided.  We're
> about ready to do the NT thing and reboot the box...
>
> Thanks.
>
>
> [0] http://www.sunmanagers.org/archives/1999/0826.html
>
> --
> Brian J. Pardy / x4332
> Unix Systems Administrator
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> sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
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