Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!oz.cis.ohio-state.edu!jgreely From: jgreely@oz.cis.ohio-state.edu (J Greely) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: Bugs and Problems Message-ID: Date: 12 Mar 90 04:49:03 GMT References: <9887@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Reply-To: J Greely Organization: Ohio State University Computer and Information Science Lines: 133 In-reply-to: rogerj@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu's message of 12 Mar 90 01:01:00 GMT In article <9887@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> rogerj@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Roger Jagoda) writes: >I have noticed the following bugs, have nay of you also noticed these >(and, come up with fixes/work-arounds!)? Not all of these are bugs (although I suspect all of the blank spaces at the end of your lines are (cut-and-paste problems?)). >-- 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? They're not swapfiles. They're created by /usr/etc/kern_loader for some reason (presumably related to loadable kernel modules), and don't seem to cause any problems if removed. If they're really an annoyance, delete them from cron as often as necessary. If you want user files deleted from /tmp on logout, add a LogoutHook to root's defaults database that executes something like this: find /tmp -user ~$1 -print | xargs rm -f >-- What are the ".places" files that are everywhere? Erasing them seems >to make no difference...does having them there? They're used by the Browser to hold icon types and positions for the Browser, and I believe they're also used to speed up display of directories under all browser views (subsuming the function of the .list file from 0.x). >-- When users throw files into the "Black Hole" then log out, the files >are still there! I'd call that a feature, and a damn sight safer than the Mac behavior. I don't use the Black Hole at all myself, but if I were in the habit, I'd rather have the system take the cautious view. Personally, I've never been quite sure exactly under what circumstances a Mac will empty the trash can. In keeping with their general philosophy, NeXT forces the user to make that choice. >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! LogoutHook can handle this as well, although I'd limit it to files more than (say...) 3 days old. Like so: find ~$1/.NeXT/.NeXTtrash -mtime +3 -print | xargs rm -f >-- 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" Nifty. I hadn't noticed them, but I just found 300 such lines dated yesterday, averaging one per minute. Note that these are *not* fatal errors. All 300 that I found were stamped with the same process id. Also, there were no complaints about printing, on this or on the one other day I have these messages from. >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. Bingo. We don't have anyone using Mathematica regularly. If it's not communicating properly with npd (or, alternatively, if npd is not sufficiently robust to handle protocol errors) it could certainly be causing such crashes, which are not necessarily related to the error message given above. >-- Another npd error causes this message: >" no reply to status request from npd -203" >"DPSlibrary Context Error code 1101" >"DPSlibrary Context Error code 1103" I don't see any of the last two, but the first one is quite common among the 300 "mismatch" errors from yesterday, but again, doesn't seem to be fatal. >Then at that point a console window comes up with a panic statement. Never seen it. >-- 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 can't comment on this, since we don't own any of the swap drives. All of the machines on campus were purchased with hard disks. >-- Terminal/Shell have a bug in that they don't properly update utmp or >wtmp. Yup. In general, utmp and wtmp handling seems to be something that's not treated seriously. loginwindow grudgingly handles utmp, but leaves wtmp for a LoginHook (and they don't supply one that emulates the default behavior of a "normal" unix machine, sigh). >A work-around so far has been to launch more terminals, eventually >getting to the tty previously owned. Didn't someone put a program in one of the archives that cleans up after this mess? >-- NetInfo cloning does NOT appear to work. and >-- A BIG bug! NMSERVER/PORTMAP/NIBINDD (all started from /etc/rc) seem Having only two NeXTs to play with, I've never done anything big with NetInfo. Gerrit? >NFS getattr failed for server : RPC: (unknown >error code) I like that one...:-) That one's so common on anything that runs NFS that it's usually treated as meaningless noise. Happens every time something crashes around here, or goes down for backups. >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! Documented. FrameMaker is about the only thing I know of that gets accents right. As for underline, I'm afraid I regard that with a quiet "so?". Underlining is only a poor man's italic anyway, so why mess with it on a system that provides better ways of emphasizing text? Yes, FrameMaker supports it, but it supports lots of things that aren't useful often (but are good to have on the rare occasions when you *do* need them). -- J Greely (jgreely@cis.ohio-state.edu; osu-cis!jgreely)