🚀 go-pugleaf

Environment:
- NeXTStation Color Turbo, 16MB, 250MB
- NeXTStep release 2.2 (not extended)
- On heterogeneous network of 3 NeXTs (all the same) and 2 SUN's (one IPC
  running SunOS Release 4.1.3 (ZONE_FIX), and one old sparkstation 1 running 
  SunOS Release 4.1).
- NeXT's running netinfo and NIS
- One of the Sun's is the yp server
- the NeXT that sometimes hangs is a clone netinfo server; but another one
  is also a clone and it doesn't hang.
- All systems NFS mount each others directories (only each machine's normal
  user's home directories).
- Thin net.
- all netmask, broadcast, and IP addresses have been double checked and 
  are consistent with each other.


One of our NeXT's hangs intermittently.  It seems to happen 
when it tries to access the network, be it via an NFS look up or
even just a ping.  When it hangs on a ping, it doesn't display the
1st line, ie: "PING crocus: 56 data bytes" until it's ok again.  Once
it shows that, the machine seems to be OK again.  This indicates to
me that it is having trouble looking up the hostname in netinfo 
from the master netinfo and configuration server -- does this make
sense? (after all, it is a clone, maybe it should just look it up
locally?)


*Sometimes*, when it happens we get:
        Sep  9 21:04:19 panther mach: NFS server (autonfsmount[121]) not responding still trying
        Sep  9 21:04:44 panther mach: NFS server (autonfsmount[121]) ok

.....but not all of the time.


*Sometimes*, it comes back in a couple (4 to 15) minutes, but sometimes
it never does (well, we've gotten tired waiting and rebooted it).


.....Generally........:
On the NeXTs' ping *usually* shows 0% packet loss, but *sometimes* it shows 
around 25%.  The SUN's seem to never show any packet loss during a ping.

The SUN's just generally seem to be more resilient.  I haven't seem them
"hang" at all when doing things to the network.  An ls to a remote machines
directory comes back *really* fast, while the NeXTs sometimes 
pause for some time before an ls on a remote filesystem returns.  Does 
anybody have an explination of this behavior?




Many thanks in advance to anyone who can help me!!!  Please email me 
directly, I will summarize the (very hopeful) solution.

Cheers,
Kevin
kjb@uts.amdahl.com