Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!batcomputer!rogerj From: rogerj@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Roger Jagoda) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Bugs and Problems Message-ID: <9887@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> Date: 12 Mar 90 01:01:00 GMT Reply-To: rogerj@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (Roger Jagoda) Organization: Cornell Theory Center, Cornell University, Ithaca NY Lines: 130 Folks, I have noticed the following bugs, have nay of you also noticed these (and, come up with fixes/work-arounds!)? -- Everytime I look in /private/temp I find these files called "k_load000100*" that are anywhere from 20K to 5MB! What are these? After a logout, they DO NOT go away! That's a LOT of waste of disk. If they're swap files, whay don't they go to /private/vm/swapfile? -- What are the ".places" files that are everywhere? Erasing them seems to make no difference...does having them there? -- When users throw files into the "Black Hole" then log out, the files are still there! Look in /.NeXT/.NeXTtrash/...that directory holds all the things "tagged to be trashed" but not actually removed. The average user isn't going to remember to click on Files-Destroy after moving things to the "Hole". Now, I know this is supposed to emulate the Mac's trash-can icon service, but after a log-off, the "Hole" should be considered wasted and the files purged. I can't tell you what a waste of disk space this is! -- Despite the upgrade to OS 1.0a, we have still noticed a TON of printing problems. Some of the most common are that the npd daemon crashes with errors: " npd 102]: found mismatch on printer status, 0x00000010 !=0x00000000" which of course they aren't equal. This looks like a simple buffer mismatch, isn't npd doing parity or error checking? Anyway, a restart of the npd SOMETIMES works. At other times we get the message: npd: couldn't connect to network daemon, restart npd which is of course nerve racking as that's what you're trying to do! This error propmts a reboot of the machine which is really poor. There must be a better way...."I just can't go on like this!" BTW, most of the npd crashes are from users on Mathematica. Perhaps the people at Wolfram haven't quite got the bugs worked out? -- Another npd error causes this message: " no reply to status request from npd -203" "DPSlibrary Context Error code 1101" "DPSlibrary Context Error code 1103" Then at that point a console window comes up with a panic statement. Now, sometimes typing "c" for continue returns to the WorkSpace, but other times there is a real kernel panic and the machine has to be restarted. Most of the time, users are in WriteNow when this happens...and that's supposed to be stable! -- There is a MAJOR bug in the mach_swapon routine. With the 40MB Quantum drive in place, swapping is UPPOSED to take place there (i.e. the drive gets auto-mounted as /private/swapdisk and swapfile is part of that tree). Part of the rc scripts sets the PRIMARY swap site there and the secondary swap site to /private/vm/swapfile. Unfortunately, even if you set a hiwat (for high-water mark) in /etc/swaptab, if the Quantum fails (25% of ours have...5 out of 25 so far!), swapping will go to the secondary swap point...in the case of a netboot client, this is the file server. There, the swapfile under /private/vm/swapfile grow out of control and eventually brings down the server. In our case we have seen these grow to almost 200MB...despite the hiwat settings on both the client and the server! Mach is known to have some of the best memory managment internals of any system...what happened here!? -- Terminal/Shell have a bug in that they don't properly update utmp or wtmp. If you issue "finger" on a system where a user has just logged off, it will show that user still logged in AND owning a pseudo-terminal! This means that script commands and other tty-dependent commands fail with "permission denied" errors. A work-around so far has been to launch more terminals, eventually getting to the tty previously owned. Then Mach recognizes the error and turns the "owned" tty over to the current user who then has the proper rights, but what if the previous owner openned up 6 ttys (why shouldn't he/she, NeXTStep is a good windowing environment), the the new user has to launch at least as many just to keep up! We've tried a number of things, but all of them seem to cause more problems for the "next" user as each time more Terminals have to be launched. -- NetInfo cloning does NOT appear to work. After setting up the proper "serves /.network" property on a to-be-cloned-to netinfo disk-full client, you got to the Coniguration server and issue the "nidomain -c network /network" command. True, the directory /etc/netinfo/network.nidb is created on the clonee, but if the Config. server goes down, this "cloned" server does NOT kick in and backup with passwd or machine idents. What good is it to do the clone then?! We have also tried settting "NETMASTER=-YES-" in the clonee's /etc/hostconfig file, but this causes worse problems as the portmapper/nmserver daemons on the Config server start getting confused and stall the network! See more below. So, is there a way to backup the Config. server's netinfo services? There NEEDS to be, otherwise netinfo suffers just as YP does when the YP server goes down...netinfo is just in another package...:-( -- A BIG bug! NMSERVER/PORTMAP/NIBINDD (all started from /etc/rc) seem to have problems when an RPC timeout occurs. The errors look like this: netinfo sleeping: RPC: Timed out lookupd 64]: netinfo sleeping: RPC: Timed out NFS getattr failed for server : RPC: (unknown error code) I like that one...:-) The the machine crashes and WON'T come back up. According to the startup screens, either nmserver completes, but portmap and nibindd crash out. Is there a better portmapper out there we could ftp and install? Have other people found this problem? Some minor bugs: The EMACS tutorial (only 800 lines or so) was left off the distribution. It is normally in /usr/lib/emacs/etc/TUTORIAL but is not on the 1.0 distribution disk. WriteNow STILL has no underline and CANNOT do accents properly (puts them off to the side, not over the letter where they belong). For a machine with WYSIWYG DPS, you'd expect better. FrameMaker does it correctly! That's all for now. Thanks for listening. --Roger Jagoda --Cornell University --FQOJ@CORNELLA.CIT.CORNELL.EDU