[OpenSIPS-Devel] Hang due to "no more nonces can be generated"

[Bogdan-Andrei Iancu]

Hi Alistair,

This is related to authentication. OpenSIPS is keeping state for all the 
nonces it generates in order to avoid nonce re-usage.  The error you get 
means that all the available slots for generating nonces are used (by 
default are 100 000 of them), but no nonce was replied (getting a response).

Do you have such a large traffic that you may have more than 100 000 
authentication requests at a time (without getting the responses yet) ?

You may try to reduce the nonce lifetime and make the un-answered ones 
to be released faster . see nonce_expire param:
    http://www.opensips.org/html/docs/modules/1.4.x/auth.html#id2526655

- try setting this to 30 seconds .

I'm trying to figure out if in your case it is a simple problem of load 
or it is a bug in the nonce reservation mechanism.

Regards,
Bogdan

Alistair Cunningham wrote:
> We've just had OpenSIPS 1.4.2 stop processing SIP packets and 
> effectively hang. During this time, it logged the following many times 
> to /var/log/daemon.log:
>
> ERROR:auth:build_auth_hf: no more nonces can be generated
> ERROR:auth:challenge: failed to generate nonce
>
> Restarting OpenSIPS has temporarily cured it, but I expect the problem 
> will come back.
>
> Another problem (probably unrelated) on the same machine was that when 
> running "opensipsctl online", no output was produced and the following 
> was logged to daemon.log:
>
> ERROR:core:create_mi_node: no more pkg mem
> ERROR:mi_fifo:mi_fifo_server: command (ul_dump) processing failed
>
> I've since set the following in config.h:
>
> #define PKG_MEM_POOL_SIZE 10*1024*1024
>
> and this problem has gone away (opensipsctl online produces 1793 lines 
> of output), but it's unclear whether this will help with the nonce 
> problem (I'm thinking probably not). In any case, may we please have 
> either a config file option or a command line option to set 
> PKG_MEM_POOL_SIZE without needing to patch the source code?
>
>