johnl@n3dmc.UU.NET (John Limpert) (03/23/89)
Why does a running expire process prevent rnews from running while a running rnews process does not prevent expire from running? I have noticed some problems on my system when expire is run by cron at the same time rnews is processing incoming compressed batched news. The contents of the active file get out of sync with the actual min/max article numbers in some of the newsgroups. This causes problems with rn and rnews. Rn will sometimes 'reset' a newsgroup, presumably because the min/max article numbers in the active file are inconsistent with what it finds in the .newsrc file. Rnews will run into problems storing new articles due to the max article number not being correct. It has to keep trying to store the new article at an incremented article number until it succeeds. After looking at the sources I couldn't find anything in the locking scheme that prevented expire from interfering with rnews. Rnews removes the lock from the active file as soon as it has determined that expire is not running. When it updates the active file, rnews locks the sys file (LOCKF was defined). This prevents multiple rnews processes from interfering with each other, but it doesn't prevent expire from running and rewriting the active file. Is this the way the news software is supposed to work? IMHO, rnews shouldn't be updating the active file while expire is running. Rnews should sleep until expire has finished creating the new active file. Am I missing something? -- John A. Limpert UUCP: johnl@n3dmc.UUCP, johnl@n3dmc.UU.NET, uunet!n3dmc!johnl
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (03/24/89)
In article <634@n3dmc.UU.NET> johnl@n3dmc.UU.NET (John Limpert) writes: >Is this the way the news software is supposed to work? IMHO, rnews >shouldn't be updating the active file while expire is running. The problem is that expire (especially old B News expire) can take a long time, and your news system is locked up meanwhile. -- Welcome to Mars! Your | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology passport and visa, comrade? | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu