At 10:29 5/08/02 -1000, Ethan Butterfield wrote:

>I've got an Ascend MAX 6000 (one of 6), running software version 8.0.2. It 
>previously had finger turned on (so our support department could get 
>connection info for troubleshooting) and working fine. Last Wednesday, 
>however, we used it to replace a very aging old MAX 6000 which used to be 
>the head of our dial-up pool. The only configuration info that was changed 
>was the Ascend's name, ethernet IP/subnetmask, default route, and dial-up 
>pool assignment. Since the cutover, finger has stopped working and the 
>port registers as closed. 
>
>I've tried disabling/re-enabling finger to no avail. There were no active 
>IP filters blocking TCP/UDP 53, but just in case I put in a couple of 
>filters to explicitly allow the traffic to the MAX, and that didn't work. 
>All the documentation I've read and the mailing list traffic I've found 
>suggests that finger should really just work once you turn it on. 
>
>Does anyone have any advice? The only thing I haven't tried is rebooting 
>the MAX after making sure that Finger->Yes is saved in the active config. 
>I'm loathe to do that as this is the first MAX in our dial-up pool and to 
>do so would disconnect 47 customers pretty much any time of day.

Hi,

One of our MAX6000's running 9.0.3 suddenly one day decided that finger
wasn't going to work anymore. One of our servers polls the box using finger
every 5 minutes for the purposes of graphing users online and other
statistics.

I don't recall whether it was prompted by a configuration change, or
whether it happened by itself.

At first the finger port was still open, but trying to access it produced
no output, and timed out. Later on it changed to the finger port being
closed and rejecting a connection completely. No amount of enabling or
disabling finger would get it working again.

Finally the box was rebooted for another reason, and ever since then finger
has been working fine....the interesting thing is that the uptime when
finger first stopped was less than two weeks.

My guess is there is a bug in the finger daemon that persists as late as
9.0.3. I think you'll just have to bite the bullet and schedule a reboot
for early in the morning when you have the minimum number of customers
online....

Regards,
Simon