Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!fernwood!apple!decwrl!ucbvax!THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM!nsb From: nsb@THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM (Nathaniel Borenstein) Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.andrew Subject: Re: "old hidden messages" in AMS bboards Message-ID: <0b=L0cu0M2YtQvhlc1@thumper.bellcore.com> Date: 30 Oct 90 12:20:56 GMT References: Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 28 Excerpts from internet.info-andrew: 29-Oct-90 Re: "old hidden messages" i.. Bob Oesterlin@rchland.ib (581) > I post a message to bboard "advisor.foo". About 30 mins later, I check > for new messages. I'm subscribed to advisor.foo, so I expect to see my > last post. Messages shows me that the folder has new messages, and a > check from messages show the folder has new messages, but none are > displayed. The .MS.Master/Update file has been updated, and the message > is indeed in the folder. (I cd ~bboard/.MESSAGES/advisor/foo). I can then make the message appear by a "scavenge" of the bboard. This sounds very suspicious to me. When the bboard is in the bad state -- i.e. you can't see the new messages until you run a scavenge -- is there a file in that directory called ".AMS_DIRMOD"? If there is such a file, it means that things are working "right" in some sense -- the operation of adding a message to the folder was aborted, but the marker file was left around to tell the system to auto-scavenge eventually. If there is no such file, there's really a bug somewhere. Can you reproduce the circumstances in which this happens? Has anything changed recently to correspond to the advent of this bug (e.g. new hardware, new OS, new Andrew patchlevel, etc.)? In particular, you might look to see if there are any weird protections set on the relevant .MS_MsgDir files, or anything like that, though I can't imagine how that would happen.