Gnode table full

[dietrich wiegandt]

Hardware: VAX8530
Software: ULTRIX 3.1

Hello,

recently our system got into an almost unusable state complaining
that the gnode table was full.

Running pstat -i revealed that in our table of 1392 entries 875 entries
belonged to the same user, and the rest did not suffice to run a decent
service for the remaining logged on 60 or so users.

The user with all these busy entries in the gnode table was NOT logged on, and
there was no process on the system belonging to him. Of course he claimed
to be totally innocent.

Any idea by what manipulation we might have got in such a state?  We don't
know for how long we have been running with a gnode table threatening to
overflow, so the problem may have arisen days before we noticed it.

We have a rather special environment with many machines from different
manufacturers and lots of NFS mounts (including possibly this user's files)
to remote machines going on.

Any hints would be very much appreciated.

Dietrich Wiegandt
CERN CN Division