res@colnet.uucp (Rob Stampfli) (02/07/91)
I have just been experimenting with a problem I had with cnews running on an AT&T Unix-PC (3B1) (3.51m OS). Occasionally, newsrun would terminate prematurely, leaving partially uncompressed files. No news was lost -- the problem was self correcting on the next invocation of newsrun. It did leave partially uncompressed news files in the incoming news directory, though. I traced this problem to the use of the <MSG> key on the console -- apparently all processes attached to w5 (SMGR) get the SIGINT signal (Signal 2) each time the <MSG> key on the console is depressed! The scenerio goes like this: Newsrun comes across a control message and sends the news administrator (me) mail. I am on the console and press <MSG> to see what the mail is. Newsrun gets SIGINT, and terminates. I have changed newsrun to ignore signal 2. Since newsrun is a shell script, this was fairly easy to do. Obviously, this is not a cnews problem. Cnews merely makes the SMGR bug more visible due to the long-running nature of its crontab scripts. I post this to the the news.software.b group only to warn 3B1 users of cnews who might not otherwise see this. For us 3B1 owners, I think we need to investigate what the full implications of this phenomenon are. Obviously, the use of the <MSG> key can interfere with the execution of crontab processes if they are not explicitly protected. Anyone have any ideas? -- Rob Stampfli, 614-864-9377, res@kd8wk.uucp (osu-cis!kd8wk!res), kd8wk@n8jyv.oh