Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!ncar!tank!shamash!nic.MR.NET!thor.acc.stolaf.edu!fritchie
From: fritchie@thor.acc.stolaf.edu (Scott Fritchie; Systems Programmer)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.mush
Subject: 7.0 & Mt. Xinu's getpwuid()
Summary: Bizarre bug in Mush? in Mt. Xinu's code? (wouldn't be the first time..)
Message-ID: <11725@thor.acc.stolaf.edu>
Date: 16 Mar 90 19:25:19 GMT
Sender: fritchie@thor.acc.stolaf.edu
Reply-To: fritchie@thor.acc.stolaf.edu (Scott Fritchie; Systems Programmer)
Organization: St. Olaf College; Northfield, MN
Lines: 39

Greetings Net-Land,

I've sent this query to Dan Heller, but he has not heard of this problem
before, so if anyone has run into this bizarre problem, please post/mail
me.  The problem is this:

We've been using Mush 6.5 here at St. Olaf for quite a while now.  When 7.0
was released, I grabbed it as soon as possible to take advantage of the
bugfixes, etc.  After compiling, 7.0 would seem to spin its gears forever,
never even getting to the "Mail User's Shell (7.0 ...)" startup message.
I've been very busy, so I haven't had a chance to find out why until now.

We're running 4.3 More/BSD with NFS from Mt. Xinu on 2 VAX 11/780's.
In init.c:init(), the call to getpwuid() gets stuck/never returns.
Poking around the code for the C library, I've found that an RPC call
within libc/yp/yp_match.c:yp_match() gets a bad exit status, so
yp_match() sleeps for a few seconds and tries again.  Unfortunately, the
RPC call never succeeds, so the function never exits.  (Actually, I found
that it did succeed once, after about 20 minutes of the RPC call, sleep,
etc. cycle.)

Whether or not you're familiar with the Mt. Xinu specifics or not may
not be necessary, I suppose.  What is *odd*, though, is that all other
system programs which use getpwuid() work perfectly, regardless of
whether they were compiled last year or an hour ago.  I even recompiled
Mush 6.5 yesterday to see if there was some problem with our C library,
but 6.5 works fine.  However, 7.0 does not.  It is very disconcerting,
to say the least.

I can't see what Mush could be doing to confuse Yellow Pages like that, but
if you've heard of this problem (and know of a fix), I'd really appreciate
it.

						-Scott
---
               Scott Fritchie, Systems Programmer and Postmaster
                 St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN  55057  USA
       Domain: fritchie@acc.stolaf.edu  UUCP: ..!umn-cs!stolaf!fritchie
    "Yeah, boss, I'll be in late today.  UNIX refuses to boot on my Ford."