Re: pkg/42607 (pkg_add hangs in ftp when there are dependencies (multiple packages))

[David Holland <dholland-pbugs%netbsd.org@localhost>]

The following reply was made to PR pkg/42607; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: David Holland <dholland-pbugs%netbsd.org@localhost>
To: gnats-bugs%NetBSD.org@localhost
Cc: 
Subject: Re: pkg/42607 (pkg_add hangs in ftp when there are dependencies
        (multiple packages))
Date: Mon, 17 May 2010 04:24:43 +0000

 On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 07:50:04PM +0000, Louis Guillaume wrote:
  >  The update begins fine and starts processing all the packages. But then 
  >  I start to get ftp connection failures as in "connection refused". Even 
  >  on a manually executed "ftp -a build-machine". inetd on the ftp server 
  >  starts refusing ftp connections!
 
 inetd has a rate-limiting (mis?)feature; are you triggering it? (Check
 on the ftp server for a message like "max spawn rate" or "spawning too
 fast".)
 
 One possibility that the rate-limiting code in the inetd on your ftp
 server is broken. That code doesn't get exercised much, and I dimly
 recall some problems with it in the Linux inetd fork ages ago which
 might or might not have been fixed in NetBSD. The system logs on the
 ftp server should be able to show if this is the case, because each
 new ftp connection seen by inetd should get logged.
 
 It's also possible that if you're downloading a lot of really small
 packages over a really fast network, a fresh connection for each could
 generate enough connections to stop inetd. That would surprise me
 some, and I would have thought pkg_add would be using only one ftp
 connection and keeping it open for all the packages. But if this is
 the problem you can increase the limit by changing "nowait" to
 "nowait:256" (or some suitably large number, see inetd.conf(5)) on the
 ftp lines in inetd.conf.
 
 Otherwise, pkg_add must be doing something ~broken...
 
 -- 
 David A. Holland
 dholland%netbsd.org@localhost