gary@sci34hub.sci.com (Gary Heston) (04/03/91)
I've run into a problem the last couple of days. C news is tossing every batch with a "unable to write history file" error (in errlog). My first guess at the reason is the good 'ole ulimit--history is now 8388608 bytes in size. My initial work-around is to rebuild history. This should reduce the file quite a bit. Next, I'll reinstall with a shorter history maintainence time (I don't recall what it's set to; probably 30 days). Unfortunantly, this problem will recurr, in my case, as news volume keeps increasing. I'm going to need a better workaround. (Note that I don't consider this to be a fault of C news, I'm posting in news.software.b in part to let other people be aware of this.) I'm going to need either a way to increase the default ulimit for non-root users about 16384, (I've inquired about this in the past, with no response) or a way to set up relaynews (I think) to run as root, so it can write the larger file. 2.x is not an option--it's not available for MultiBus machines. The comp.unix.sysv386 FAQ lists a method for upping the default ulimit, under 2.x. This does not work under 1.0.6 (lots of stuff got changed). I'd really rather not have C news running as root; while it's fine software, it shouldn't be necessary to do that because of an OS shortcoming. I have, in the past, conducted a couple of extensive searches for upping ulimits' default, without success (we have a system in another plant with the same problem, with a large database). Any suggestions? -- Gary Heston System Mismanager and technoflunky uunet!sci34hub!gary or My opinions, not theirs. SCI Systems, Inc. gary@sci34hub.sci.com I support drug testing. I believe every public official should be given a shot of sodium pentathol and ask "Which laws have you broken this week?".
rmtodd@servalan.uucp (Richard Todd) (04/03/91)
gary@sci34hub.sci.com (Gary Heston) writes: >I've run into a problem the last couple of days. C news is tossing every >batch with a "unable to write history file" error (in errlog). My first >guess at the reason is the good 'ole ulimit--history is now 8388608 bytes >in size. ... >I'd really rather not have C news running as root; while it's fine >software, it shouldn't be necessary to do that because of an OS >shortcoming. I have, in the past, conducted a couple of extensive >searches for upping ulimits' default, without success (we have >a system in another plant with the same problem, with a large database). Hmm. There's a good chance that one little piece of C News on your system is *already* running as root -- the setnewsids program, which is used for setting euids and such correctly for the benefit of relaynews, and is definitely needed on some SysV systems. setnewsids is a "wrapper" that relaynews executes when it finds it has the wrong permissions, and after things get set right, re-execs relaynews. Since setnewsids runs setuid-root, you can stick the ulimit() in there; I seem to recall someone else with a SysV with stupidly low, non-configurable default ulimit mentioning that he did this. You might try this. -- Richard Todd rmtodd@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu rmtodd@chinet.chi.il.us rmtodd@servalan.uucp "Elvis has left Bettendorf!"