Hi, On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 02:38:00AM +0000, Andy Smith wrote: This problem appears to be the same thing that has affected obstler a couple of times: someone shuts down a VPS and then the host seems to get stuck all the while sending "unregister_netdevice: waiting for <interface> to become free. Usage count = 1" to the console. New network traffic to the host itself is disrupted and it stops being possible to start new VPSes. It seems to be related to IPv6, a bug where deleting an interface (such as when a VPS is shut down) while it still has IPv6 addresses active can sometimes cause a reference count in the kernel to not be decremented. It's a race condition and happens very rarely. It's unclear whether it's actually been fixed in the latest kernels (all the search results I find just say "does this still happen?") and as very few people actually use IPv6, I think the best thing to do is change configuration to attempt to avoid this situation. I've already don't it on obstler, the machine which originally started being affected by this. So on Monday I'm going to disable radvd everywhere and not have any global IPv6 addresses on the interfaces on the BitFolk host side. As a consequence auto-configured IPv6 will stop working. If you want IPv6 to continue working you will need to set it up statically, which generally involves manually adding addresses inside your /64 and adding a default IPv6 route via fe80::fcff:ffff:feff:ffff/64. If you want to keep working IPv6 but don't know what to do, please respond either on or off-list and I will try to help. Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting