Mailing List Archive

igor@txc.com (Igor Schein) writes:
>
> my rmtab file is huge and has a lot of obsolete entries. I wanna clean
> it up. Has any1 done that? I know that if it's possible at all,
> there must be some trickery involved, because just removing the file
> doesn't work - it creates recreated on the file - possibly from
> memory? Maybe removing AND rebooting will do the job?

There was a change, no later than 6.1, so that /etc/rmtab got rewritten
from the active list in memory, rather than just appended to, whenever
it got too full of deleted entries. I contributed to a thread about this
on toasters in mid-June 2001 if you can find it. I see that I wrote then:

| > The problem that obsolete entries not explicitly cancelled by client action
| > never go away definitely still exists, though.
|
| Indeed, it seems that in some ways it may be worse. One used to be able to
| sneakily cancel dross by writing judicious "#"s to /etc/rmtab oneself, and
| after the next reboot they would be gone. Now such trickery is lost each
| time a new /etc/rmtab is created from (presumably) the in-store active list.
|
| The na_rmtab(5) man page in 6.1R1 still says that /etc/rmtab "may be removed
| before rebooting the server" to get rid of such things, but I wonder whether
| it now has to be *just* before rebooting, in case the file should reappear!

The man page still says that in 6.2R2. I can't think of anything else
to try... let us know whether it works!

One can, rather tediously, purge individual obsolete entries by mounting
and unmounting the right path from the right IP address, but only as long
as one can still run up a client at that IP address (or steal it for a
while as a virtual interface on some other client, etc.). There really
ought to be a filer command to say "act as though you had received an
UMNTALL from such-an-such an IP address", or even "from all IP addresses".
Of course, maybe there is one, among all those undocumented "advanced
mode" commands ... :(

Chris Thompson
Email: cet1@cam.ac.uk