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From: boberg@ihuxv.ATT.COM (Bruce Oberg)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: SPOOLNEWS/locking question
Message-ID: <1943@ihuxv.ATT.COM>
Date: Mon, 25-May-87 20:19:40 EDT
Article-I.D.: ihuxv.1943
Posted: Mon May 25 20:19:40 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 26-May-87 05:40:49 EDT
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories - Naperville, Illinois
Lines: 27
Keywords: rnews SPOOLNEWS

[i was originally going to mail this to rick, but i thought others may
have insight and/or interest]

until this week, all the IH machines were fed news using my own spooling
shell scripts. now they all use the SPOOLNEWS option for rnews and i
have a slight problem. each machine is fed new news approx every 20
minutes while rnews -U is run once at 1800 and 0200 to take advantage of
non-prime CPU time. the problem is that whenever rnews -U is running, it
can only get through a couple spool files before a delivery of new news
comes in and rnews kills off the rnews -U. thus, rnews -U is never able
to catch up on spooled news. stopping the incoming deliveries is a
problem since they arrive over a rather unpredictable network. 

looking at inews.c, i notice that rnews tries to lock the active file in
all cases. when an rnews -S (run by rnews -U) can't do the lock, 42 is
returned to rnews -U and recognized by dounspool() as a signal to stop
unspooling.

my question: if SPOOLNEWS is set, does rnews (without a -U or -S) have
to lock the lock file (subsequently killing off rnews -U)? it seems to
me that rnews could spool stuff no matter who else is running. what sort
of problems could there be with rnews and rnews -U running concurrently?


bruce oberg
IH netnews admin
.!ihnp4!ihuxv!boberg