tod@sunfs2.camex.uucp (Tod Hagan) (08/21/88)
We are running B news 2.11 patchlevel 14 on a Sun 3. Our
/usr/spool/news and /usr/local/lib/news directories are cross-mounted
from another machine. We occasionally see messages in our log file
like:
Can't find "junk" in active file [it's there]
Unknown newsgroup news.software.b not localized [we receive it]
Usually the unfound group is "junk", but any valid newsgroup can
appear in the unlocalized message. (I'm not talking about newsgroups
that are legitimately not localized here, such as ba.all.)
I suspect that these messages are due to transient NFS errors
encountered while accessing the cross-mounted files. The function
ngfcheck() in ifuncs.c logs the "Unknown newsgroup xxx not localized"
message, but I can't figure out the circumstances. The localize()
function in inews.c is more lucid -- it will log the 'Can't find "x"
in active file' message and quit if it encounters an error from fgets
while reading through the active file (too bad it doesn't print the
value of errno).
We download news every night, and sometimes a few of of these messages
show up in the log. The other night something happened during news
processing that caused every remaining article to get this treatment
(from the log file, long lines broken):
Aug 18 03:29 husc6 Unknown newsgroup news.software.b not localized
Aug 18 03:29 husc6 received <1445@datapg.MN.ORG> ng news.software.b
subj 'Solution to news dup site names'
from sewilco@datapg.MN.ORG (Scot E Wilcoxon)
Aug 18 03:29 husc6 No valid newsgroups found, moved to junk
Aug 18 03:29 husc6 Can't find "junk" in active file
The server for /usr/spool/news and /usr/local/lib/news was up (nothing
was logged to /usr/adm/messages during that time). The machine
running news logged a few NFS RPC timeout messages for the server at
the time, but not as many as I'd expect. It is as if the news
software got wedged by the transient NFS errors
Questions:
1. Are we running the news software in an environment it was not
intended to support?
2. Are there any patches for these problems? (We've got B news 2.11
patchlevel 14.)
Thanks.
--
Tod Hagan Camex, Inc. ARPA: tod%lloyd@husc6.harvard.edu
75 Kneeland St. UUCP: tod@lloyd.uucp or husc6!lloyd!tod
617-426-3577 Boston, MA 02111