Strange Portmaster Behavior

Victor Muslin (vmuslin@wp.prodigy.com)
Wed, 11 Oct 1995 22:12:17 -0400 (EDT)

I am rather new to Livingston product line having just instlled the
first PM-2eR at our site. The portmaster exhibits strange behavior at
times and I could not find anything helpful in the manual and the tech
support hasn't gotten back to me after two days and two service calls
to the 800 number hotline. I also quickly checked some archives but
didn't see anything obvious that would help me. Any help is
appreciated.

(1)
The portmaster is set up for users to dial in via PPP. Once in awhile
a user can't get through (and I have seen this happen). Then a few
minutes later the problem seems to clear itself up. Did this happen to
anyone? Also, this may be relevant (or may be a separate question
altogether), but when I look at the syslog I sometime see:

...dialnet: Port Sx ppp_sync failed dest.

What does this mean?

(2)
There was a time when I noticed that RADIUS server wasn't getting
accounting packets indicating that a session had ended. Upon examining
the syslog output again I saw a number of:

...system: restarted

What is "restarting"? Why is it "restarting"? Under what conditions is
it supposed to "restart"? Are all connections dropped during a "restart"?
How is it different from:

...system: rebooting

which I gather happens when I issue a reboot command. Btw, usually I
see "restarting" message immediately after "rebooting" message. This I
suppose is normal and is NOT what I am questioning above where
"restarting" messages appeared WITHOUT the corresponding "rebooting"
messages...

Also sometimes I see in the log:

...error: port S8 spurious interrupts

What does this mean?

Generally, is there a good description of what various messages output
by syslog mean?

Thanks.

+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| Victor Muslin | |
| Prodigy Services Company | Voice: (914) 448-4737 |
| 445 Hamilton Avenue, H11A | Fax: (914) 448-8133 |
| Whilte Plains, NY 10601 | Internet: vmuslin@prodigy.com |
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