Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!news.cs.indiana.edu!cica!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucsd!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!cs.utexas.edu!yale!cmcl2!panix!alexis
From: alexis@panix.uucp (Alexis Rosen)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Pnews failure, *not* in a moderated group
Message-ID: <1990Dec3.015827.19038@panix.uucp>
Date: 3 Dec 90 01:58:27 GMT
References: <1990Nov30.111026.66@panix.uucp> <1990Dec1.224630.11927@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: PANIX - Public Access Unix Systems of NY
Lines: 37

henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>alexis@panix.uucp (Alexis Rosen) writes:
>>First of all, once in a while new articles never get posted. Using rn, I
>>followup to an article (or make a new one), do everything normally, and send
>>off the article. Something happens, since shelling out of rn and running ps
>>shows various cnews-things (like inject and anne.jones) running. But the
>>article just vanishes into a black hole...
>>The other problem is the (very infrequent) dropped newsbatch... [symptoms]
>>This only happens when cunbatch is told by spacefor that there's not enough
>>room for an incoming batch. With close to 60MB free on the spool disk, this
>>was simply not possible...
>
>A possible reason for both of these is that your system is hitting the
>ceiling on some other resource, like processes or open files, and programs
>are failing as a result.  We know there can be problems with spacefor if
>it hits such a ceiling; the result tends to be a "no space available" report.
>It's plausible for inews to hit similar difficulties, although I'd have to
>put heads together with Geoff to produce a detailed explanation.

That's not it. I though of that too, but we don't have more than 1/3 the
max number of processes possible at any given time. As for open files, this
seems much more reasonable- with the uuxqt bug in A/UX 2.0 (before I wrote
a wrapper script to deal with it) we were seeing that all the time.

However that bug has been dealt with, so we're not coming anywhere near the
maximum # of open files either. Any other ideas?

As for Pnews failing, I saw it again today. I did some tests, and while I'm
not too sure of anything yet, it seems to have something to do with suspending
rn immediately after returning from Pnews. In other words, Pnews is no longer
running, I suspend back to a shell, and the article vanishes. Any ideas what
this could mean?

---
Alexis Rosen
Owner/Sysadmin, PANIX Public Access Unix, NY
{cmcl2,apple}!panix!alexis