Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!usc!ucsd!ucbvax!ANDREW.CMU.EDU!ghoti+ From: ghoti+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU (Adam Stoller) Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.andrew Subject: Re: CUI messages Message-ID: Date: 17 Jul 90 13:56:48 GMT References: Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 41 Excerpts from internet.info-andrew: 17-Jul-90 CUI messages Bob Oesterlin@rchland.ib (470+0) [..] > Found 2 old hidden messages in > /afs/rchland.ibm.com/usr0/bboard/.MESSAGES/advisor/aix-andrew (0 > orphaned snapshots, 0 processing errors). [..] > This may be related: every once in a while we'll see messages show up in > a folder that are from 2 weeks to 6 months old... what causes this? Yes - they are related -- (I hope I get this correct, it's been a while...) it's basically a built-in scavenger. At times, it is possible for a message to miss getting indexed in the .MS_MsgDir file (or perhaps lose it's index?) -- I believe this happens mostly in combination with some sort of file server problem (certainly with AFS, probably with other similar filesystems - maybe even plain UNIX). It isn't (wasn't) always a case of a problem with incomming mail - in fact, for a while it was most common with respect to mail/posts that had been deleted, and had never been fully purged from the directory. Every so often (? I don't remember the details here - sorry) when the messageserver is adding a new message to the folder/index - it will notice that something might be amiss, and attempt to do a (hopefully quick) scavenge in the directory to find any messages which are missing from the index. If it finds any, it prints out a warning (upper excerpt above), and appends them to the folder. Note, that is -> append <- -- hence at times you will see posts that could a few minutes to several years old appear as if they had just arrived (lower excerpt above). If it's happening a lot - someone (?) will probably have to try and track down the cause - if it happens occasionally with no real regularity - I wouldn't worry about it too much (unless you want to ;-) --fish (PS: be sure to look for followups from Craig and NSB - which will catch the many mistakes I've probably made in the above *sigh*)