Wilson Wong wrote after I wrote:
 
>> I tried to start another VT session to our 957 this
>> morning.  Got "connection refused" message.
>> After a little looking around, discovered that even
>> though we had only one LOCAL and 8 REMOTE
>> NS users, NSCONTROL said we had a total of
>> *131* ACTIVE VTSERVERS.....  Huh ?!?!?........
[.....SNIP my stuff....]
 
>If the patch they referred to you is DTSDDK7, it is a beta patch for hung
>dtc ports.  Actually it probably doesn't matter, because it doesn't work
>anyways.  Your problem may be different since you are having problems
>with vt sessions and we seem to have problems with dtc nailed port
>sessions only.
 
Yeah, believe ours is strictly a VT problem (this time, anyway).
Follow up from PICS is that there is actually a group of three
patches in this area:  One for VT Services, one for the Transport,
and one more which depends on one or both of the first two.  This
VT patch series is still in Beta as of today, but supposed to be
GR first part of next week.
 
>Currently, our problem has been escalated and both Vesoft and HP are
>working on it.  My next question was... are you using Vesoft's product,
>specifically Security/3000???...............
 
Nope.  We have Audit/3000, but do our own user security
in the database.
 
>Scenario:  [...SNIP...]   abnormal exit leaves them still connected to the
3000
>as far as the os is concerned... [...SNIP...]  it appears that a message is
>sent and then waits for some sort of reply (i/o).  In the meantime as it
>waits it begins to consume console buffer space somehow and in a matter
>of some length of time, all the console buffers are allocated and no one
>else can log on or log off because they can't send a message to the
>console.
 
Bingo.  This is just what was happening to us earlier on
5.0 PULL, for VT sessions that were abnormally terminated
as you described.  But this last ghost session problem is
different;  system seemed to work fine until you hit some
hard VT limit.  Even then, all direct connect sessions
continued to work fine.
 
Anyway, we are supposed to have the latest and
greatest patches next week.  Hopefully we can play
ghostbusters and keep those phantoms in check
until then...........    :-)
 
Ken Sletten