very weird linux emulation breakage ... rpc, but might be pipe/vm related

[Andrew Atrens <atrens@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,

This is a really weird one ...

linux cleartool (clearcase) broke sometime last week ... I just
cvsupped the latest sources and rebuilt and it appears to still
be there. I wish I could be more exact as to the day of the break,
but I think I first noticed it last Thursday (at the time I was too
busy to investigate and chalked it up to some maintainance work
occurring on our local network ...)

After a fair bit of investigation I've characterised it as follows -

Clearcase commands that involve querying a non-DragonFly vob server
all work, as do commands that query viewservers on non-DragonFly nodes.
HOWEVER commands that query my (DragonFly) viewserver hang, and
eventually report rpc timeout.

It gets even weirder. On the surface the symptoms look as
though as root (from any node!!!), I can run DragonFly viewserver
queries, but I can't run them as non-root - with one proviso. 
Sometimes if I run the query as root a few times it seems as though
something gets cached, because at that point I can repeat the query
as non-root and have it work...

I didn't understand how the DragonFly view server could be sensitive to
the cleartool client being non-root, especially when the client was on
another box !!! Then when I looked at the creds list (w. ethereal) I
found that root had more auxillary group creds than my userid. So I added
myself to all the groups in my /etc/group file, and amazingly found that
I was able to do much larger queries... that's when I discovered that 
root was fubared for huge queries too. Yeesh.

I've attached linux_kdumps of the below (local) viewserver queries -
atrens.txt contains the client trace, view_server-atrens.txt contains
a trace of the view server during that query attempt - there's a similar
pair there for root, too.

Any help/suggestions you folks could provide would be greatly appreciated.

Andrew.


-- atrens@atrens: /usr/opt/viewstore/atrens_APP_COMMON/vobs/equinox_ne_foundation/cpumon (15:35) --
$ ktrace -f ../atrens -id cleartool ls
Makefile@@/main/ottawa_main/1                            Rule: BASE_COMMON_FN81_20040220_0146.6829 -nocheckout
^C
Interrupt

-- atrens@atrens: /usr/opt/viewstore/atrens_APP_COMMON/vobs/equinox_ne_foundation/cpumon (15:35) --
$ su
Password:

-- root@atrens: /usr/opt/viewstore/atrens_APP_COMMON/vobs/equinox_ne_foundation/cpumon (15:35) --
# ktrace -f ../root -id cleartool ls
Makefile@@/main/ottawa_main/1                            Rule: BASE_COMMON_FN81_20040220_0146.6829 -nocheckout
cpumon.bun@@/main/ottawa_main/3                          Rule: BASE_COMMON_FN81_20040220_0146.6829 -nocheckout
includes@@/main/ottawa_main/2                            Rule: BASE_COMMON_FN81_20040220_0146.6829 -nocheckout
objects@@/main/ottawa_main/1                             Rule: BASE_COMMON_FN81_20040220_0146.6829 -nocheckout
sources@@/main/ottawa_main/2                             Rule: BASE_COMMON_FN81_20040220_0146.6829 -nocheckout

-- root@atrens: /usr/opt/viewstore/atrens_APP_COMMON/vobs/equinox_ne_foundation/cpumon (15:35) --
# exit
exit

-- atrens@atrens: /usr/opt/viewstore/atrens_APP_COMMON/vobs/equinox_ne_foundation/cpumon (15:35) --
$ ktrace -f ../atrens -id cleartool ls
Makefile@@/main/ottawa_main/1                            Rule: BASE_COMMON_FN81_20040220_0146.6829 -nocheckout
^C
Interrupt

Attachment: atrens.txt.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data

Attachment: root.txt.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data

Attachment: view_server-atrens.txt.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data

Attachment: view_server-root.txt.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data