UPDATED: Cannot fork errors

[David Henning]

Hello All,

I'm running 2.2.2a on a Netra T1, Solaris 8.  256 Mb RAM. 440MHz cpu. I've 
uninstalled and reinstalled Nessus using the install script.  I'm trying 
to scan a Class C network internally, no firewalls, etc.  Nothing 
excessive with the numbers in the config, 16 hosts at a time, 10 checks 
per host.

First, I got lots of these messages:

[Tue Jan 11 14:31:31 2005][3387] Error : could not fork ! Error : Not 
enough space
[Tue Jan 11 14:31:31 2005][3387] fork() failed too many times - aborting

So I ran a script to check my swap usage.  I have 660 Mb of swap 
configured and it was getting completely used up when running a scan.  So 
I added 2Gb of swap and ran it again with the following result:

total: 49160k bytes allocated + 200808k reserved = 249968k used, 2524856k 
available
total: 55144k bytes allocated + 261928k reserved = 317072k used, 2457536k 
available
total: 75280k bytes allocated + 487784k reserved = 563064k used, 2210232k 
available
total: 115632k bytes allocated + 947040k reserved = 1062672k used, 
1705936k available
total: 153920k bytes allocated + 1270080k reserved = 1424000k used, 
1340720k available
total: 173520k bytes allocated + 1409136k reserved = 1582656k used, 
1179912k available
total: 171496k bytes allocated + 1345112k reserved = 1516608k used, 
1246152k available

As you can see, it uses a lot of swap (maybe Renaud is letting Ron Gula do 
some coding for him? Just kidding Ron! Sorry for the inside joke everyone. 
;)  but it does actually stabilize to the range indicated by the last 3 
lines.  However, now the scan progresses to a point where I get:

[Wed Jan 12 18:40:01 2005][647] find_service.nes (pid 900) is slow to 
finish - killing it

At this point there are no packets being sent and lots of <defunct> 
processes.  The scan just hangs and never progresses.

Anyone with a suggestion on what to try next?
Anyone know of a version of Linux I can load on this Netra?

Thanks again,

David Henning
Principal Security Analyst
Hughes Network Systems
x5533

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