[news.software.b] relaynews doesn't update active file

sjg@melb.bull.oz.au (Simon J Gerraty) (10/06/90)

I am running C News (patched to 25 May 1990), on a System V
machine (Bull DPX/2 340).  The system is fed via NNTP if that
matters. 

Relaynews appears not to be updating the active file.  The
history file does get updated and the logs appear normal.

-rw-rw-r--   1 news     daemon     22364 Oct  4 14:05 active
-rw-rw-r--   1 news     daemon     22364 Oct  2 17:10 active.old
-rw-rw-r--   1 news     daemon       168 Oct  2 17:10 active.times
-rw-rw-r--   1 news     daemon         0 Oct  5 08:10 errlog
-rw-rw-r--   1 news     daemon         0 Oct  4 08:10 errlog.o
-rw-rw-r--   1 news     daemon        84 Oct  4 03:05 errlog.oo
-rw-rw-r--   1 news     daemon         0 Oct  2 08:10 errlog.ooo
-rw-rw-r--   1 news     uucp     1041455 Oct  5 13:05 history
-rw-rw-r--   1 news     uucp          64 Oct  5 13:06 history.dir
-rw-rw-r--   1 news     uucp      480044 Oct  5 13:06 history.pag
-rw-rw-r--   1 news     daemon     37453 Oct  5 13:06 log
-rw-rw-r--   1 news     daemon      3152 Oct  4 16:05 log.o

log and history both reflect the last incomming news.
active is untouched since the day before (when I did `touch
active`).

I have used newsbin/expire/recovact to ensure that the active
file did indeed reflect the current state of /usr/spool/news -
hence the active.old file.

Apart from the fact that active not being updated indicates a
problem, it seems to cause nnmaster (nn6.4) to not collect new
news which is why it did the `touch active`.

I've looked through the files in cnews/notebook and can't find
any indication of probable cause.  So far I have not spotted
anything in relay/relaynews.c either.

Notes about this system:
Does not grok #!/bin/sh, I have put the necessary magic at the
start of all shell scripts (I think:-) to get around this.  It
needs and uses setnewsids with no apparent problem.

Any help would be appreciated.
-- 
Simon J. Gerraty		<sjg@melb.bull.oz.au>

#include <disclaimer,_witty_comment>

henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (10/07/90)

In article <1990Oct6.004103.2076@melb.bull.oz.au> sjg@melb.bull.oz.au (Simon J Gerraty) writes:
>Relaynews appears not to be updating the active file.  The
>history file does get updated and the logs appear normal.

This gets the nod, I think, for "weirdest problem yet".

One thought does come to mind...  Modern active files exceed 32KB.
The "big" variant of the active-file code tries to rewrite the whole
file in one gulp (one fwrite(), to be precise).  If you specified a
large address space, but your fwrite() takes signed 16-bit size
parameters, this could result in a failure.  I would expect a complaint
about this, but maybe something else is wrong too...
-- 
Imagine life with OS/360 the standard  | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
operating system.  Now think about X.  |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry