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From: roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Strange problem with /etc/mtab
Message-ID: <1990Feb17.023003.7444@phri.nyu.edu>
Date: 17 Feb 90 02:30:03 GMT
Organization: Public Health Research Institute
Lines: 32


	Every once in a while, a strangeness shows up in my /etc/mtab file.
Right now, it looks like:

stdin: not in comprc7decode: 0 0
/dev/ra0a / 4.2 rw 7 1
/dev/ra0h /usr1 4.2 rw 1 5
[etc]

	This is pretty typical.  It's obviously a message from compress
somewhere in the news system, and indeed this only started happening when we
put C news up.  Damned if I can figure out how it gets into my mtab file.
It doesn't seem like random file system damage, since it's always more or
less the same message, always the first line in /etc/mtab, never trashes the
rest of the file, and as far as I can tell, never ends up anywhere but in
mtab.  Furthermore, the two 0's at the end make it look like something tried
to coerce it to look like a standard 6 field mtab entry.

	We're running MtXinu 4.3BSD/NFS on a Vax-11/750.  The date on the
/etc/mtab file is 14:49:12 (ls doesn't give you time to the second, but
other tools do), which must have been sometime during the time /etc/rc was
being run.  The first process logged in our accounting file is (naturally)
/etc/accton, at 14:49:20, 8 seconds later.  At this time, there shouldn't be
any news stuff running, other than /usr/lib/newsbin/maint/newsboot, which
just removes a few dead lock and temp files.

	Does anybody have any idea what might possibly be going on?
-- 
Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
{att,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy -or- roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu
"The connector is the network"