guy@anasazi.UUCP (Guy Finney) (03/01/85)
Ever since we started getting news last November (before that we didn't
use uucp much), we've noticed that occasionally when uuxqt starts up to
process its X. files, it will simply delete them and their corresponding
D. files instead of processing them. At first we noticed that it seemed
to happen when uuxqt started up WHILE uucico was running. "Great", we said.
"All we have to do is frontend uucico so it doesn't start another copy
while one copy is running" (on the assumption that the 2nd copy is
started from the hourly uudemon.hr). We did that successfully, but
then last night I watched with my own eyes while uuxqt merrily deleted
its files WITHOUT a uucico running anywhere on the system. The entries
in the LOGFILE look normal enough, except that the times for the uuxqt
entries are three seconds apart(!).
As you might imagine, this is a vexing problem. Even more vexing is
that someone reading this might have a solution which, though
sent to us, might itself be deleted! AARRGGHH. Our friendly vendor
isn't ready to admit this is happening until we can reliably reproduce
the problem. Sigh, if we could do that we might stand a chance of
avoiding it. We're System V, release <who-knows>, and will be very
interested in hearing from anyone who may have seen or conquered
this problem.
Or for that matter, is there anything like a public domain uuxqt
floating around?
--
Guy Finney
{decvax|ihnp4|hao}!noao!terak!anasazi!guydan@digi-g.UUCP (Dan Messinger) (03/12/85)
In article <137@anasazi.UUCP> guy@anasazi.UUCP (Guy Finney) writes: >Ever since we started getting news last November (before that we didn't >use uucp much), we've noticed that occasionally when uuxqt starts up to >process its X. files, it will simply delete them and their corresponding >D. files instead of processing them. At first we noticed that it seemed We were experiencing the very same problem. We eventually discovered that when other sites called us, news would process as it should. But when our crontab started a poll to another site, all the news files that we received would disappear. THE SOLUTION: It seems that when crontab fires a process off, there is no environment. Or at least no PATH in the environment. And unbatch uses execlp() to run rnews. Get the picture? I changed the execlp() to an execl() and hardwired the path to rnews. While I could have added a setenv PATH statement to the script that we use for polling, I decided that the extra copy of sh was unnecessary overhead. (Note: this problem started when we received an update to our OS, going from a mostly V7 to a mostly 4.1. I'm sure that this problem is a rarety, and not the general case) >As you might imagine, this is a vexing problem. Even more vexing is >that someone reading this might have a solution which, though >sent to us, might itself be deleted! AARRGGHH. I'll mail you a copy of this, too. Dan Messinger ihnp4!umn-cs!digi-g!dan