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From: munnari!anu.anu.oz.au!gih900@CSC.DNET (Geoff Huston)
Newsgroups: news.software.anu-news
Subject: RE: Errors during batch file add and RMS-F-HEADERFULL......
Message-ID: <9001212235.AA21809@uunet.UU.NET>
Date: 22 Jan 90 14:01:37 GMT
Sender: ANU-NEWS Discussion <ANU-NEWS@NDSUVM1.BITNET>
Reply-To: Geoff Huston <munnari!anu.anu.oz.au!gih900@CSC.DNET>
Lines: 40

>The symtoms were that each entry in the batch created an entry in the
>JUNK group but the text of the message was missing from the JUNK
>directory.  This happened mysteriously in the middle of a large
>batch add.  Further investigation revealed that attempting to
>create ANY file of ANY type on the NEWS disk volume generated the
>VMS error message RMS-F-HEADERFUL.  As the messages manual states,
>this indicated that the file header map area is/was full.  Their
>suggested USER ACTION was to backup the volume to tape and restore
>it.  How this might help is a mystery to me.  I did it, it helped,
>but I'm still a little disconcerted.
>
>The disk in question had PLENTY of free block on it.  There were just
>under 50000 files on the volume and the estimated maximum number of
>header entries should be somewhere around twice that figure.  The
>disk is an RA81 initialized with the default parameters.
>
>Can anyone:
>
>        1) Explain how restoring a volume from disk solves this problem...
>
>        2) Come up with a series of reasonable precautions to avoid the
>           problem in the future.
>
>I have some general ideas involving re-initializing the volume with
>different /CLUSTER and /MAXIMUM_FILES parameters but because of the
>time involved and the lack of information I have, I am appealing to
>the NET for suggestions and/or war stories along a similar track....
     
The MAXIMUM_FILES parameter is the one too look at - NEWS creates LOTS of small
files which fills up the allocated header space in INDEXF.SYS.
     
You can find out more about this by posting to comp.os.vms
     
Geoff Huston
     
     
                        -Andy Newman
     
                         Software Systems Programmer
                         Yale University....