FreeRadius crash

[Doug Hardie]

On May 19, 2007, at 16:34, David Wood wrote:

> Hi Doug and everyone,
>
> In message <444BFFDD-3494-451C-AB44-BFC74DD130E8 at lafn.org>, Doug  
> Hardie
> <bc979 at lafn.org> writes
>>
>> On May 8, 2007, at 00:49, Alan DeKok wrote:
>>
>>> Doug Hardie wrote:
>>>> FreeRadius 1.1.2 on FreeBSD 6.1 using libpthread.
>>>
>>>   Upgrade to 1.1.6.  It has a lot of fixes that may help.
>>>
>>>   It looks like it's crashing when starting a new child thread.   
>>> That
>>> may be a pthread issue in the underlying libraries.
>>
>> Upgraded to the latest of everything.
>
> Including the OS? FreeBSD is up to 6.2-RELEASE(-p4) now. FWIW, I  
> didn't
> find going from 6.1 to 6.2 that painful - though there's always the  
> risk
> of something going wrong.
>
>> Same problem except that it
>> only took about an hour before the first crash.
>> Any ideas how to figure out what is going on?  Or at least to find
>> the request that is in process when the crash occurs?
>
> Can I ask - especially as I'm the maintainer of the FreeBSD FreeRADIUS
> port - are you using the port or not? I've put in a lot of effort to
> tidy up the port over the last few versions, and I believe it is now a
> good quality and easily maintainable port, despite it missing one  
> or two
> features I'd like to add when I get the time.
>
> Most notably, I've done away with unnecessary or irrelevant patches  
> (in
> fact, the only patch that remains is to do with FreeBSD 4.x and will
> probably be ripped out soon).
>
>
> As an aside, I hope to create a 2.0.0-pre1 port soon - though I've  
> been
> away and very busy, and there's still a ports freeze in place with the
> ongoing work to switch FreeBSD to XOrg 7.2. I don't know whether  
> testing
> with 2.0.0-pre1 is of interest to you, but I intend to try running
> 2.0.0-pre1 on my site as soon as possible for testing purposes.
>
>
> Hopefully someone can give you some debugging advice, and we can  
> figure
> out whether this is a FreeRADIUS or FreeBSD problem. I doubt that the
> port itself is to blame, as apart from the aforementioned source patch
> (which just adds a single #include line to one file), and a some
> patching to the build system to change the install location of raddb,
> the port simply wraps the contents of the tarball from the FreeRADIUS
> project.

I am using the port as of about a week ago.

One thing I just noticed.  The following is in radiusd.conf:

thread pool {
         start_servers = 5
         max_servers = 32
         min_spare_servers = 3
         max_spare_servers = 10
         max_requests_per_server = 0
}

However, ps -H shows only 3 active threads.  I would have expected  
more.  But perhaps its idle right now.  I think 8 threads is the most  
I have ever seen.  The last crash was trying to start the 8th  
thread.  Perhaps upping min_spare_servers above 8 would help.