Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!novavax!twwells!bill
From: bill@twwells.uucp (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: B news damage control
Message-ID: <896@twwells.uucp>
Date: 1 May 89 02:54:39 GMT
References: <644@n3dmc.UU.NET>
Reply-To: bill@twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells)
Organization: None, Ft. Lauderdale
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In article <644@n3dmc.UU.NET> johnl@n3dmc.UU.NET (John Limpert) writes:
: Does anyone have any patches for the B news software that make it
: act sensibly when the news file system runs out of inodes?
: Currently it loses the incoming news batches and gets stuck in some
: sort of loop generating error messages to errlog.  I would be happy
: if it would just lock the news system until the file system is
: repaired.

What I did was to make the following changes: if inews does an open
that runs out of inodes, I create a lock file (on another file
system, natch :-) and then hang. I then set up all my uucp stuff so
that nothing would start when the lock file existed.  (This was
necessary because uucp and news share the same file system.)

As soon as I noticed that things were hung, I'd do the following:
kill the uuxqt, kill the rnews parent, kill the rnews child, go to
single-user mode, fsck the dead file system, remove the lock file,
and go to multi-user.

It wasn't pretty, but it worked.

: My thanks to AT&T and all the vendors who have given
: me such an interesting file system problem :-(.

And it is such a trivial bug to fix. If you are running Microport
SysV/386 3.0e, I have a patch. If not, and you don't mind doing a
little kernel hacking, it isn't hard to fix.

---
Bill                            { uunet | novavax } !twwells!bill