Article Title           : decnet_debugging_example
Creation Date           : unknown       
Author                  : ERW, NCD Technical Support
Last Update             : November 11, 1992
Last Update By          : ERW, NCD Technical Support
Expiration Rules        : Applies to VMS until further notice.
Location		: NCD-Articles/Host_Systems/VMS
=============================================================================
 
This is an edited copy of parts of a discussion that resulted from
a customer's intermittent DECnet problems loading fonts.  Note that
under 2.3 (and forever after, we hope) customers already have an
account dedicated to serving DECnet requests from NCD's.  So some
of what appears below would actually apply to the NDS_NDS account
which gets created by 2.3 (and later) versions of NCDCONFIG...

------------------------


1.  I think that you told me that only one user in the whole group has any
problems font loading.  This is mysterious, since, from the log you sent me,
you are using the DECnet account for all FAL access.  However, if the problem
is isolated to one NCD, it would be interesting and instructive to proxy-bind
that single NCD to a unique account (which would be similar to the DECNET
account) whose sole purpose would be to run with FAL$LOG = 3 and serve files
to the NCD.  I can help you set this up if you want.  If we do this, we can
set whether isolating font serving to a special account serving only one NCD
helps this user, and, if so, try to determine why.  If it does not help, at
least we'll have a limited set of NETSERVER.LOG files to examine.

  uaf> copy decnet special_server/uic=[xxx,xxx]
  uaf> add/proxy <problem_ncd>::ncd_nds special_server/default
  uaf> exit
  $ create/dir/owner=special_server somedisk:[special_server]

etc.  I think you get the idea.

2.  Another choice might be to do a 

  $ DEFINE/SYSTEM NETSERVER$TIMEOUT dddd hh:mm:ss.cc

This will make the netserver processes hang around longer than the default 5
minutes.  I would recommend a value like "0000 08:00:00.00", i.e. eight
hours.  This would cost some memory but will remove the wait time of process
creation of the FAL process.

3.  Another choice might be to create a group of "permananet" servers.  This
is discussed in depth in section 8.4.3.2 of the "VMS Networking" manual.

Item 1 is for additional debug and perhaps offers a fix which will tell us
something.  Items 2 and 3 are fixes which may actually mask a problem which
would persist but be masked.