Wow!  That's interesting.  I've never seen your exact situation but I've
sure seen some modules do strange things...even caused by the
shelf-controller (especially under heavy load doing multishelf) 

Have you done the old swap slot/card/chassis thing?  When you say hang, do
see the hdlc2ec bouncing? (down, reset, load, boot, post).  How about your
fatal-history log or syslog info?  It's hard to believe that there is
NOTHING in these logs after what you have described happens.  Does it happen
only when you are in the card (open n n )? Again, debugging on a heavily
loaded multishelf set doing tunneling may have made the SCM burp on you,
etc.  Of course, if this happens even when the slot is closed and no
debugging is on, that'd be a null issue.  Are you running 9.0.9 for a
specific reason or can you downgrade to 9.0.6?  

It's nice when you ask a bunch of questions and get even more back, eh?  

Just probin'.

 - David


-----Original Message-----
From: Øystein Homelien [mailto:oystein at homelien.no]
Sent: Sunday, November 17, 2002 1:42 PM
To: ascend-users at bungi.com
Subject: [Ascend] (ASCEND) ascend tnt hdlc2ec cards _hanging_
temporarily


Anyone had problems with something like that?  We have several TNTs that 
we see the same type of problem on.  Every once in a while, typically 
several times per day, hdlc2ec cards will hang.  We discovered this the 
following way:

telnet to tnt
log in
open 1 x -- open a hdlc2ec card
hdlc -p -- start displaying statistics of hdlc controllers

The hdlc -p command typically prints out one line every second or so.  
We notice that the card hangs since suddenly it stops printing hdlc 
statistics every second.  When this happens, the "open" connection to that 
particular card is dead/non-responsive.  After 10-20-30-40 seconds, the 
card will come back up, in that the connection once again responds to 
commands and users connected through the card will have packets flowing to 
and from them again.  While the card is hung, no ip/ppp traffic is 
forwarded to the users connected on that card at all (we see this by 
pinging a user on the card while this happens), but when the card comes 
back up everything works again (except typically some users have hung up 
because they do not expect 10-40 seconds of total packet loss during their 
dial-up session).

Our TNTs are running 9.0.9, and as far as I can see this problem also 
exists in 9.0.4.  We have no idea when this problem started happening, as 
we haven't found anything indicating what is happening in the logs, we 
just noticed that users sometimes experienced packet loss, and l2tp 
sessions timing out because of it.  

The most notable features we use are:

* radius w/"call-check", auth and acct
* stac
* hdlc + modems
* l2tp
* multichassis mpp

Anyone ever seen this, possible solutions?  

I am posting to the list because our local Lucent branch is being pretty
much non-responsive to the problems we are having.  They are simply not
interested.  Does Lucent care about its TNT customers who have invested
heavily in these boxes?  I'm starting to wonder, so this is a cry for
help.

Our customers certainly can't accept 30-second dead connections now and
then, so unless we can get this TNT problem fixed, we are probably going
to have to use the TNTs as doorstops and heaters, and go with Ciscos.  
It's just a pity that we actually believed in Ascend's promises back then
when we had to choose between Cisco and Ascend for dialup equipment.

-- 
Oystein Homelien, CVO             |  oystein at powertech.no
PowerTech Information Systems AS  |  http://www.powertech.no/
Nedre Slottsgate 5, N-0157 OSLO   |  tel: +47-23-010-010, fax: +47-2220-0333

++ Ascend Users Mailing List ++
To unsubscribe:	send unsubscribe to ascend-users-request at bungi.com
Archives: http://www.nexial.com/mailinglists/