lai@vedge.UUCP (David Lai) (05/03/88)
I am running patchlevel 14 of 2.11. The problem I have is that expire logs (into /usr/lib/news/log) the message 'dbm store failed'. This occurs if the store() call returns an error. Apparantly this causes the history file to be deleted. Then afterwards, incoming news causes the mail to be sent to usenet: history file missing... the problem has been taken care of. Well, what it means by "taking care" of the problem is creating a fresh new history file, thus the new history file (created) contains incorrect info (ie. all old history lost). I also suspect that the .dir and .pag files are no longer in sync with the new history file. BTW, cron run's expire daily with flags -e 10 -E 30 to keep filespace down, but keep history of 1 month. What is the problem? It it a problem with dbm? My dbm manual page says: "All key/content pairs that hash together must fit on a single block. Store will return an error in the event that a disk block fills with inseparable data". Does this mean that my history file is too large for dbm to handle? I also suspect that too many entries are placed in one slot (of the hashing function) overflowing the (what I beleive to be ridiculous) internal dbm limit of 1 disk block. Has anyone else noticed this problem? Any fixes? I really hate to do an 'expire -r' every few days (which is about how often the above problem occurs) to rebuild the history file. I haven't tried the recently posted 'dbz' replacement of dbm optimized for news. Does anyone know if dbz will solve my problem? -- "What is a DJ if he can't scratch?" - Uncle Jamms Army The views expressed are those of the author, and not of Visual Edge, nor Usenet. David Lai (vedge!lai@larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu || ...watmath!onfcanim!vedge!lai)
lai@vedge.UUCP (David Lai) (05/18/88)
Hi again. I posted a message a few weeks back when I had some problems with the history file disappearing. I thought it was a problem with dbm or with expire. Well I replaced dbm with the recently posted dbz. I still have the problems (sometimes the history file disappears after expire, sometimes after posting a message, seems to happen at random). It is most annoying as it happens about once every two days. Does anyone out there experience the same problems, and how did you solve it. (we run news 2.11 patchlevel 14 on a sun-3. We expire with -e 10 -E 30.) Thanks. PS once in a while the active file disappears too! -- "What is a DJ if he can't scratch?" - Uncle Jamms Army The views expressed are those of the author, and not of Visual Edge, nor Usenet. David Lai (vedge!lai@larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu || ...watmath!onfcanim!vedge!lai)
lai@vedge.UUCP (David Lai) (05/26/88)
In article <330@vedge.UUCP> lai@vedge.UUCP (David Lai) writes: >Hi again. I posted a message a few weeks back when I had some problems >with the history file disappearing. I thought it was a problem with >dbm or with expire. Well I replaced dbm with the recently posted dbz. >I still have the problems (sometimes the history file disappears after >expire, sometimes after posting a message, seems to happen at random). >It is most annoying as it happens about once every two days. Does anyone >out there experience the same problems, and how did you solve it. >(we run news 2.11 patchlevel 14 on a sun-3. We expire with -e 10 -E 30.) > >Thanks. > >PS once in a while the active file disappears too! Thanks to Keith S Pickens who solved my problem, indeed 3 machines were running expire simultaneously, causing all sorts of wierd files to disappear. =From: ut-sally!swrinde!maxwell!ksp@gatech (Keith S. Pickens) =Message-Id: <8805210300.AA03329@maxwell.swri.edu> =To: lai@vedge.com =Subject: Re: history file missing = =We experienced a similar problem. Our news libs are on a NFS file =system which is mounted across the net. The symbolic link in /usr/lib =for crontab had been removed and replaced with the real file. This =resulted in expire being run on more than one machine. We would lose =both the history file and the active file from time to time. Fixing =the symbolic link so that expire only ran on our news machine solved =the problem. = =Hope this helps. = =-keith A major round of applause for Keith, and a rasberry for me for not noticing this earlier. -- "What is a DJ if he can't scratch?" - Uncle Jamms Army The views expressed are those of the author, and not of Visual Edge, nor Usenet. David Lai (vedge!lai@larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu || ...watmath!onfcanim!vedge!lai)