Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!srcsip!mingus!jkimball From: jkimball@SRC.Honeywell.COM (John Kimball) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: rn and NFS; large search strings and mangled .newsrc's Keywords: NFS, hung rn processes, newsetup, long search patterns, corrupted .newsrc's Message-ID: <40973@srcsip.UUCP> Date: 29 Nov 89 19:51:07 GMT Sender: news@src.honeywell.COM Reply-To: jkimball@src.honeywell.com () Organization: Honeywell Systems & Research Center Lines: 44 (Maybe a news.software.readers would make sense -- where *should* you post something about newsreader software?) We've been having a few persistant problems with rn. Context: lots of Sun3 workstations, one serving as a news server. All running SunOS 4.0.3. News reading is done by NFS-mounting the spool tree; news posting is done with the NNTP mini-inews. People read news with rn (patchlevel 40) or with a homegroup GNUemacs newsreader mode. Many people also use a homegrown 'news biff' icon which periodically does an 'rn -c'. Here's the problems we've seen with rn: 1) When the news server gets swamped (high load average), rn processes frequently lock up. 'ps' shows them in 'D' state, "disk (or other short term) waits". These guys are basically unkillable. This doesn't seem to happen to other processes doing NFS accesses. Does rn do something wierd? I don't know where to look. 2) Possibly related: occasionally 'rn' suddenly believes that your .newsrc doesn't exist, and so it merrily creates you a new one (blowing away the one which did exist.) Often it is the 'news biff' invocation of "rn -c" which does this. I tracked down where the message ("running newsetup") is coming from, in rcstuff.c -- a .newsrc is built when fopen(rcname,"r") returns "Nullfp". Why would it return Nullfp when the file exists? I've put in a patch which refuses to do the newsetup if rn was invoked "-c", but I'd like to know why rn and NFS aren't getting along. 3) Likely completely unrelated: I have some very long search patterns in my .rnmac file. Recently they've gotten long enough that my .newsrc file is getting corrupted -- a random newsgroup line is not written out correctly, instead a string containing pieces of a pattern is written in its place. Has anybody seen this before? (Bumping up LBUFLEN doesn't seem to help.) Thanks in advance! John Kimball Inet: jkimball@src.honeywell.com Honeywell Systems and Research Center postmaster@src.honeywell.com, etc Computer Sciences/Software Technology uucp: !srcsip!jkimball 3660 Technology Drive, MN65-2100 phone: 612-782-7343 fax: 612-782-7438 Minneapolis, MN 55418-1006 Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com