Subject: wierd ftp "dir" behavior

From: "Alan B. Steiner" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Jun 1995 23:04:09 -0700

We've got a Sun 670MP with 4 processors, recently upgraded with Ross 90MHz
processors.  Running SunOS 4.1.3, reasonably up-to-date patch-wise.  Recently
the ftp "dir" command has broken.  Well, it works maybe one in 10 times;
the other 9 times it returns nothing (no error, just no files).  In fact,
the installation of patch 100726-17 (sun4m jumbo patch for kernel performance
and memory bugs) appears to have made it this bad (before this patch the
command worked about 50% of the time).

By tracing in.ftpd, (WU vers. 2.4), it seems that ftpd creates a pipe, then
forks a process to run the ls command which writes to the pipe.  ftpd reads
the output from ls on the pipe, then sends it to the client.  Whenever the
"dir" commands fails, there's nothing on the pipe.

Has anyone seen this problem?  Or does my description give any clue as to
what might be going on?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Alan Steiner
NASA Science Internet
[email-masked]