Path: utzoo!utstat!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!zephyr.ens.tek.com!tektronix!percy!parsely!bucket!leonard
From: leonard@bucket.UUCP (Leonard Erickson)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: RRN problem
Message-ID: <1810@bucket.UUCP>
Date: 10 Dec 89 09:26:30 GMT
References: <4749f11b.1766d@june.engin.umich.edu>
Organization: Rick's Home-Grown UNIX; Portland, OR.
Lines: 27

stealth@caen.engin.umich.edu (Mike Peltier) writes:

>It starts up fine, runs fine, but when I go to read a
>particular newsgroup, it comes back with "caught a SIGSEGV, .newsrc
>restored".  What does this error mean, and where might it
>be coming from?

I ran into this all the time on a 286 box. The problem in my case was
that I could read articles ok, but if I tried to do a kill or read by
subject, I'd get the error.

The problem was that rn stores article numbers as 4-byte integers. For
any of those functions, if it has been compiled with the normal defaults,
it tries to build an array of article numbers from 1 to [high article #].
If the high article number is greater than 16383 this would result in a
structure bigger than 64k. So you get a segment violation error.

I was told that the fix was to recompile with some option changed
(something about optimize for space not time). I passed to info on to
the news administrator who apparently never did anything with it. I
now get my news elsewhere.

-- 
Leonard Erickson		...!tektronix!reed!percival!bucket!leonard
CIS: [70465,203]
"I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools.
Let's start with typewriters." -- Solomon Short