tom@idis.UUCP (10/04/84)
[bug bait]
Having just become the local net-news administrator, my first job
was to find why readnews was hanging when it tried to read net.micro. The
problem, it turns out, relates to the bitmap[] array and the clear macro.
When the article number (stored in the global 'bit') was >= 8193,
calling clear(bit) slopped over the end of the bitmap[] array, and fudged
the next int, which just happened to be the global 'bit'. 'bit' got reset to
8192 so that when it was incremented to look at the next article, it started
looking for 8193 again, and thus entered an infinite loop.
The fix is to redefine the size of bitmap[] in rextern.c. I took it
from bitmap[1024] to bitmap[2048], and it seems to have solved the problem.
I haven't sat down to figure at what point this new sized array will be overrun.
If I'm going over old ground, or missing something obvious , please
don't turn up the flames too high. As I said, I'm new at this job.
The above applies to version 2.10 of readnews. We are running 4.2 BSD.
regards,
Tom Neuendorffer
{mcnc,decvax,pitt} !idis!tomtom@idis.UUCP (10/05/84)
[bug bait]
On further consideration, I have noticed another change that must
be enacted before readnews 2.10 can handle articles with a name-number > 8192.
On line 303 of rfuncs.c, next is set to 8193. Apparently the authors
knew of this limit. If you are going to change bitmap[1024] to bitmap[2048],
you should also change this 8193 to 16386. It should be noted that any fixes
of this type are only effective till the new limit is reached.
Does anyone know of any reasonable method of getting inews to start
rapping these name/numbers around before these limits are hit? Are the numeric
subdirectories in net.micro causing a problem? And why can't readnews be more
intelligent when creating a new .newsrc? If the first article if 7001, does it
have to look for 7000 files that aren't there?
Again, if this is old hat, my apologies. I'm new in the news biz.
(You out there Mark?)
regards,
Tom Neuendorffer
{mcnc,decvax,pitt} !idis!tomchuqui@nsc.UUCP (Zonker T. Chuqui) (10/08/84)
The proper fix to this is to upgrade to 2.10.2, recently posted to
net.sources. There are a large number of fixes in the release including a
decent fix for the 8192 overflow.
chuq
--
From the Department of Bistromatics: Chuq Von Rospach
{amd,decwrl,fortune,hplabs,ihnp4}!nsc!chuqui nsc!chuqui@decwrl.ARPA
How about 'reason for living?'chris@byucsa.UUCP (Chris J. Grevstad) (10/10/84)
<>
There are some of us who did not receive the new version of readnews.
We would be more than happy to install the latest in readnews technology
if someone would be interested in re-posting or sending directly to us
at:
...harpo!utah-cs!beesvax!byucsa!chris--
Chris Grevstad
You see what you want to see...
You hear what you want to hear...