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From: datpete@daimi.dk (Peter Andersen)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: C-news expire dumps core
Message-ID: <1990Jul4.212921.26279@daimi.dk>
Date: 4 Jul 90 21:29:21 GMT
Sender: news@daimi.dk
Reply-To: datpete@daimi.dk
Organization: DAIMI: Computer Science Department, Aarhus University, Denmark
Lines: 46


We run C-news patchlevel 16-Apr-1990 with dbz and nntp 1.5.7, and have
experienced the following problem:

Due to a major system-crash some control files were damaged. Concerning the
news system this was the case for either history.dir or history.pag or both.
However I took quite a while to figure out that this was the case.
I did not get any mails or syslogs reporting troubles from expire, but I could
see that it did not succeed, and dumped core in the NEWSCTL directory.
If I tried running doexpire manually I got the following message:

/var/spool/news/lib/newsbin/expire/doexpire: 19606 Memory fault - core dumped

I discovered that it was the dbz-files that was corrupted when I saw that
nntpd reported things like 

Jul  2 19:47:17 daimi nntpd[2243]: openartbyid: dbminit 
/var/spool/news/lib/news/history: Operation would block

and

Jul  2 19:47:19 daimi nntpd[2243]: openartbyid: dbminit 
/var/spool/news/lib/news/history: Not owner

and

Jul  2 19:47:38 daimi nntpd[2243]: openartbyid: dbminit
/var/spool/news/lib/news/history: No such file or directory.

(and I got a lot of mails from nntpd mentioning bad input batches)
The history file was indeed present and was owned by news, so the two last
messages was a bit confusing.

But since examining the core file dumped by expire with adb showed that expire
also had problems with dbminit, I realized that the dbz-files were corrupted
and did a mkdbm which solved the problem.

My question is: In most other cases the various C-news programs is rather
verbose and mails all potential problems to me. So shouldn't it be able to
realize that the dbz-files are corrupted, and tell me that. It seems that it
*is* possible since nntpd is able to. In my particular case such a message
would have spared me several hours of work to figure out what was wrong.

Is this a bug in expire, or can I have a wrong configuration ?

Peter Andersen