Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!hp4nl!rivm!ccea3
From: ccea3@rivm.UUCP (Adri Verhoef)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Bug in unbatching (inews: inbound news is garbled)
Summary: write to pipe failed
Keywords: rnews inews
Message-ID: <1133@rivm05.UUCP>
Date: 15 Nov 88 11:18:07 GMT
Organization: RIVM, Bilthoven, The Netherlands
Lines: 34

I found a dead.letter file in /usr/spool/uucp/.Xqtdir, containing:

remote execution	[uucp job rivm13C260f (11/10-15:41:24)]
	rnews 
exited with status 1


	===== stderr was =====
write of 1251 to pipe returned -1rnews: write: No space left on device
inews: : Inbound news is garbled



It's news B 2.11.14, running on a 3B2/310 (System V 2.0.4).
This 3B2 (Memory size: 2 Mb) was said to be
"out of swap space" continuously; after upgrading
the Informix version, messages like:
	sh: cannot fork: no swap space
	fork: Not enough space
	trimlib: cannot fork: no swap space
kept appearing the days before this happened.
Could a heavy application (like Informix?) cause this trouble?

But during the unbatching there probably was a lack of
disk space, not a swap-space problem, which caused the
news not to be accepted (thus to be garbled).

Further questions:
can the unbatching be halted by the news software
and, probably most difficult, revived by uuxqt,
thus causing correct unbatching at a time when
things are back in order again, according to the
news software?
Could this be solved in B-news 3.0?  eric@snark?