malcolm (08/06/82)
#N:pur-ee:13000005:000:1411 pur-ee!malcolm Aug 5 18:29:00 1982 One of our notesfiles just got hosed up. I tried to delete the offending notes (reading them caused core dumps) but the pointers were all screwed up so I finally had to remake the notesfile. Recovering all the stuff that came in between the crash and when I fixed it was more difficult. Luckily it was a local (just two machines) newsgroup so I just resubmitted everything as one article. This isn't possible for the net.* articles since notes would then send them back to news and to the rest of world. (Imagine paying to receive the same garbage twice.) I can't think of any way to recover network wide news. I'm not sure what the solution is. There are some real problems with the lock files!!!! Every day or two we lose a lock file and I have to go in by hand and remove them. There is also a note in the comments to nfcompress saying that no one should be in the notesfile when the compress happens, but I can't imagine how this would screw up the pointers. Besides we only compress every Sunday night at 3:30AM. I can't imagine how the pointers got screwed up. The only time they should change is if two processes are writing a note at the same time. (multiple rnews at once are very common on this system). This is the second time this problem has happened here. Has anybody else seen these problems, have any ideas for error recovery, or have the time to start digging? Malcolm
mark (08/06/82)
It seems to me that one of the advantages of A or B news over notes is that if something messes up, it's easier to recover because only one UNIX file is likely to be affected, and all the UNIX tools for manipulating files can be used to manipulate news. Would someone please explain what the advantages of the notes method of storing articles is? Likewise, I'd like to know what the advantage to the notes format of machine-to-machine transmission are. Mark
egb (08/07/82)
The performance on notesfiles is SIGNIFICANTLY better than netnews. This is probably due, in part, to the one file approach of notes. Readnews has to open many files to run through a newsgroup while notes only opens 2 or 3 files. On our system the performance difference is huge (UNIX 5.0). Ed Bradford. (P.S. notesfiles still has its problems. I keep getting "orphaned responses" which have very nasty crt control sequences which puts notefiles into endless loops. Also, I haven't figured out how to automatically add new groups to the notesfiles yet <as this message will attest>. If someone can answer that question please send mail. whuxlb!egb harpo!egb ) Ed Bradford
malcolm (08/07/82)
#R:pur-ee:13000005:pur-ee:13000006:000:865 pur-ee!malcolm Aug 6 20:20:00 1982 I was told that the reason to put a number of notes into a single file was that it reduced the time for UUCP (there is a large inter-file time) and the file space (small files are wasteful). Unfortunately, I can't draw any conclusions about the relative file space requirements because of the different ways that beta news and notes expire articles. Likewise for UUCP since I never see the articles. I agree with you Mark....I would much rather pay a penalty in time/space to make it a LOT easier to maintain. I also have been pushing to have the sequencing information moved out of a notes directory and into the users home directory where he can edit/copy/backup the information. I guess the problem is how do you get access to it since notes is set user ID. Malcolm P.S. In spite of its shortcomings I much prefer Notes over the Beta News approach.