[news.software.b] 2.11 hangs

stephen@comp.lancs.ac.uk (Stephen J. Muir) (04/16/87)

I came in today to find that rnews had hung.  I rebooted the system and tried
again -- it hung again when it got to the same article in the batch.  I edited
the batch to remove the article manually and things worked once more.  The only
thing strange about the article was that it was attempting to create a group
that already exists, and with the same characteristics as the existing group
(i.e. the newgroup control message should have been a no-op).

We run 2.11, with patches up to #7 applied, on 4.2 BSD on a VAX 11/750.
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david@ci-dandelion.UUCP (David Watson) (04/17/87)

We noticed the same problem you did, namely that newgroup messages
for already-created groups "hung" news 2.11.

By glancing at a few table entries with sps and pstat, I found that inews
had blocked for exclusive access to our sys file, which it itself
had apparently locked a moment before!

At this moment, I've recompiled inews for LOCKF (we run Ultrix)
but I haven't installed it to see if that fixes the problem.
There was a huge flurry of redundant "newgroups" today, which
really made the afternoon a bit exciting, so I imagine lots of
other sites can report this same bug.

			-D.

			

jbuck@epimass.UUCP (04/17/87)

In article <1102@ci-dandelion.UUCP> david@ci-dandelion.UUCP (David Watson) writes:
>
>We noticed the same problem you did, namely that newgroup messages
>for already-created groups "hung" news 2.11.

Install patch #8 and the problem is cured.
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woods@hao.UUCP (04/17/87)

In article <1102@ci-dandelion.UUCP> david@ci-dandelion.UUCP (David Watson) writes:
>
>We noticed the same problem you did, namely that newgroup messages
>for already-created groups "hung" news 2.11.

  It bit me too, and hung our news and uuxqt queues up for almost two days
before I figured out (with help from outside) what was going on. It is a bug
in 2.11 patch #6 which is fixed in patch #8. So, if you haven't already,
immediately apply patches #7 and #8 for 2.11 news and remake news. I did
that and the problem went away.

--Greg
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