Help request: problems with a 5.1 server and large numbers of ssh users.

[Ken Smith]

On Thu, Nov 20, 2003 at 10:56:08AM -0500, Robert Watson wrote:

> Hmm.  Well, it certainly sounds like a resource limit to me, especially if
> it's a nice round number like "150" or "300".

One possibility might be running out of pseudo-terminals to support
the login sessions.  pty's are created as needed I think, and the
code that handles it is in sys/kern/tty_pty.c.  The limits on it
appear to be 256 ptys:

/*
 * This function creates and initializes a pts/ptc pair
 *
 * pts == /dev/tty[pqrsPQRS][0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuv]
 * ptc == /dev/pty[pqrsPQRS][0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuv]
 *
 * XXX: define and add mapping of upper minor bits to allow more
 *      than 256 ptys.
 */

I don't know if simply changing the :

	static char *names = "pqrsPQRS";

to something longer is all that would be required or if there are
other factors involved.

-- 
						Ken Smith
- From there to here, from here to      |       kensmith at cse.buffalo.edu
  there, funny things are everywhere.   |
                      - Theodore Geisel |