ben@dragonfly.wri.com (Ben Cox) (05/16/91)
I keep getting bad batches in Cnews which, when re-run (mv /usr/spool/news/in.coming/bad/* /usr/spool/news/in.coming) usually run just fine. "errlog" is always empty. I can see no reason for these batches to be bad, and cannot find enough documentation (gr*&^!*%!@#*) to give me any more pointers to the problem. Any ideas? -- Ben Cox ben@wri.com
henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (05/16/91)
In article <1991May15.200740.8051@wri.com> ben@dragonfly.wri.com (Ben Cox) writes: >I keep getting bad batches in Cnews which, when re-run (mv >/usr/spool/news/in.coming/bad/* /usr/spool/news/in.coming) usually run just >fine. "errlog" is always empty. As I think we mention somewhere -- if we don't, we should -- rerunning batches tells you very little, because if something was wrong with specific articles, they will be processed the first time and rejected as duplicates thereafter. Duplicate rejection is done very early, so other problems would not be seen. How old is your C News? Modern ones are generally fairly careful about errlog, but some old ones didn't flush stdio buffers in some situations. -- And the bean-counter replied, | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology "beans are more important". | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry
ben@wri.com (Ben Cox) (05/21/91)
I wrote: >>I keep getting bad batches in Cnews which, when re-run (mv >>/usr/spool/news/in.coming/bad/* /usr/spool/news/in.coming) usually run just >>fine. "errlog" is always empty. Henry Spencer <henry@zoo.toronto.edu> wrote: >How old is your C News? Modern ones are generally fairly careful about >errlog, but some old ones didn't flush stdio buffers in some situations. I checked the source, and they do flush the buffers. From relaynews(8): If relaynews cannot establish safe standard file descriptors and standardise its environment (notably PATH, SHELL and IFS), probably due to failure of malloc(3), it will exit with status of 1 and without writing any complaints on stan- dard error (errlog), as a security precaution. Well, this appears to be what's happening. /usr/lib/news/log is fine, but /usr/lib/news/errlog is empty. Why would malloc(3) fail in some instances but not in others? Hand-examination of the "bad" batches reveals no anomalies. -- Ben ben@wri.com