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From: tom@cyclone.Berkeley.EDU (Tom Holub)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.games.bugs
Subject: Re: Nethack problem
Message-ID: <1991Mar10.000911.22964@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 10 Mar 91 00:09:11 GMT
References: <2346@aber-cs.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator)
Organization: ucb
Lines: 31

In article <2346@aber-cs.UUCP> aag@cs.aber.ac.uk (Angela Gilham) writes:
>I run a copy of nethack on a dec system running Ultrix 
>4.0. It lives in my area of the filesystem and runs fine
>for me. Unfortunately, for many other people this is not
>the case. The two most common problems are that when a 
>game is started it immediately crashes leaving a zero 
>size core dump in my files or somebody gets down a couple
>of levels and the game crashes when they try to go down
>another level with a message like:
>   "DISC LIMIT REACHED (/mntda/aa_az) - WRITE FAILED
>     Suddenly, the dungeon collapses."

How does your system handle disk quotas?  If your quota is more generous
than most people's, that could explain it.  

I'm assuming that /mntda/aa_az is the Nethack playgound.  The problem is,
Nethack gobbles disk space.  Every time you go down a level, a file 
called <playername>.<levelnum> is created in the playground directory.  
This file contains all the monsters, treasures, etc., that are on that
level.  I'm pretty sure that Nethack will try to use the uid of the
person playing, whether it's setuid or not.  So, if someone near their
quota tries to play, and creating the <playername>.<levelnum> file
would push them over, your system won't let them create the file, and
Nethack dies.

If this is the problem, there's no easy way to handle it.  If Nethack isn't
setuid, you could try changing it to setuid, but I don't think that'll do it.
Other than that, you could create a 'games' account with a generous 
quota that people could use to play Nethack (or any other game).  
Or expand everybody's quotas.
 -Tom