robbinj@molihp.UUCP (Robbin W Johnson) (11/28/86)
First the configuration:
Hardware: Hewlett Packard HP9000/550 (1 CPU + 4MB Ram + 404 MB Disk)
Software: HP-UX release 5.11 (SYS V rel 2.2 + BSD enhancements)
2.11 news - patchlevel 0
The problem:
Expire is called nightly by the cron entry:
30 1 * * * exec /usr/lib/news/expire
After it has run, the LIBDIR/active file is broken. The minimum article
number and maximum article number are both equal in value and set to what
should be the value of the maximum article. That is if the directory
SPOOLDIR/news/software/b (as an example, this applies to ALL newsgroups)
contains articles 1 through 10, both the minimum and maximum article numbers
in LIBDIR/active are set to 10. None of the articles are older than 2 weeks.
The value of DFLTEXP in defs.h is 2*WEEKS. The value of HISTEXP is 4*weeks.
I did no hand customizing of defs.h outside of localize.sh (I have appended
the contents of localize.sh below). If I don't run expire, active is not
corrupted.
What gives?
I cannot run expire while this is going on. If I do so then anyone reading
the news sees one and only one article unread and all the others that may
be in the spool directories invisible.
I have to run expire since we are limited in the amount of disk storage
availible for the netnews.
If anyone has had a similiar problem I would appreciate pointers/advise on
solving this. I have looked at expire.c and have a couple of ideas since all
the playing with active is in one area, but I am unfamiliar with the algorithm
and cannot spend a lot of time on this for the next couple of weeks.
WHAT HAVE I DONE WRONG?
Please reply by mail and I will post a summary to this group if anything
obviously wrong or HP(-UX) sensitive appears.
Thank-you,
Robbin.
...!ubc-vision!van-bc!molihp!robbinj
---This is the contents of my localize.sh---
rm -f Makefile
cp Makefile.dst Makefile
chmod u+w Makefile
ed - Makefile <<'EOF'
/^UUXFLAGS/s/-r -z/-r -z -n/
g/^#USG /s///
g/^#V7 /d
g/^#VMS /d
g/^#BSD4_[123] /d
g/^VFORK/s/=-Dvfork=fork/ =/
g/^LFLAGS/s/-i //
g/termlib/s//curses/
w
q
EOF
rm -f defs.h
cp defs.dist defs.h
chmod u+w defs.h
ed - defs.h <<'EOF'
/ROOTID/s/10/3/
/N_UMASK/s/000/022/
/TMAIL/s;^;/\* ;
/PAGE/s;/usr/ucb/more;/bin/more;
/UXMIT/s;^;/\* ;
/NONEWGROUPS/s;/\* ;;
/INTERNET/s;/\* ;;
/GHNAME/s;/\* ;;
/DOXREFS/s;/\* ;;
/ALWAYSALIAS/s;/\* ;;
/SENDMAIL/s;/\* ;;
/HIDDENNET/s;frooz;moli;
/MYORG/s/Frobozz Inc., St. Louis/Moli Energy Ltd., Burnaby, BC, CANADA/
/NICENESS/s;/\* ;;
/ORGDISTRIB/s;froozum;moli;
w
q
EOFrick@seismo.CSS.GOV (Rick Adams) (12/02/86)
The problem sounds like readdir() is returning garbage. I've heard things about the 9000/500 directory structure being "interesting". In a posting talking about unipress emacs mg@unirot.UUCP (Mike Gallaher) says: However, I have spent many hours of my life compensating for the differences between HPUX on the 500 and on everything else that also claims to be Unix System V. (There are more "special case" conditionals in the Emacs code for the 500 than for any other machine...) When I wrote that flame I had just wrestled with the following differences: - the file system is neither berkeley or v7/SysV, so the bsd directory emulator didn't work until I taught it how. (HP does supply its own BSD directory emulation, but it wasn't documented for the 500, at least that I could find). - The tty driver does not support VMIN/VTIME. This *is* documented, but it depends on which hardware interface you have, which is not easy to detect (even by looking at the box!). I suspect your problems are related. You should contact whoever sold you the system and ask about reading the filesystem. ---rick
robbinj@molihp.UUCP (Robbin W Johnson) (12/02/86)
Having found some time to look into this, I found the problem and a solution. As distributed, 2.11 news assumes that if it is being brought up upon a USG flavour of UN*X there is no directory(3) library (/usr/lib/libndir.a) and that the structure of a directory in the file system is vanilla SYS V. Believing this to be true it then provides its own limited version of the directory package, making several assumptions about the format of a directory as it lives in the file system. When dealing with Hewlett-Packards's HP-UX, this is a fatal mistake. HP-UX on a series 500 machine sits on top of other layers of software, including the "SDF file system". Because of this, the format of a directory is slightly different and totally incompatible with the SYS V model. Fortunately Hewlett-Packard has provided the directory(3) library with HP-UX and so solving the problem is very straight forward. I solved it in the Makefile by removing all dependencies upon "ndir.o" and adding a search of libndir.a for those programs which might require it. This can be done from within localize.sh with one exception. The "ndir.h" file to be included must be changed to "/usr/include/ndir.h". I took the easy way out by mv'ing the origional "ndir.h" to "ndir.h.rel" to get it out of the way and then ln'ing "/usr/include/ndir.h" to "ndir.h". This could cause problems if "ndir.h" is ever changed in a minor revision. There may be far more elegant ways, if anyone has suggestions I would appreciate hearing them. As far as the "ndir.o" dependencies were concerned, I corrected that by adding the following two lines to the "ed" script in localize.sh (if you reference my origional posting, place them anywhere before the "g/termlib/s//curses" line): g/^LIBS/s/=/= -lndir/ g/ ndir.o/s/// ^watch that space...its important You might also have to add: g/#NOTVMS/s/// to prevent the compiler from breaking on the "cc" line for inews. When rn is configured, it knows enough to check for libndir.a no matter what version of UN*X it is being brought up on. This would have been a nice idea for 2.11 news. Robbin.
dennis@rlgvax.UUCP (Dennis Bednar) (12/28/86)
In article <253@molihp.UUCP>, robbinj@molihp.UUCP (Robbin W Johnson) writes: > As distributed, 2.11 news assumes that if it is being brought up upon a USG > flavour of UN*X there is no directory(3) library (/usr/lib/libndir.a) and > that the structure of a directory in the file system is vanilla SYS V. I had the same problem with installing 2.11 news on a CCI Power 6/32 machine running SVR2. Although I used localize.usg as a starting point for localize.sh, I had to modify it slightly to have the CFLAGS pass a new flag down to the ndir.c routine, so that ndir.c is commented out, and the 4.2 style directory(3) routines in libc.a (or wherever) are used instead. If anybody out in net land wants a copy of localize.cci632, please reply to me. -- -Dennis Bednar {decvax,ihnp4,harpo,allegra}!seismo!rlgvax!dennis UUCP