oester+@rchland.ibm.com (Bob Oesterlin) (10/27/90)
Recently, we seem to be a lot of "Old Hidden Messages" showing up in our bboards - That is, the message will not appear for days or weeks, unless a scavenge is done. The CUI bboard daemon never shows any errors in the log file, and I can't think of anything that's changed. I'd say it happens 5-10 times/week. So, the questions are: Why does a bboard post sometimes come up as "hidden"? Is there anything I can do to track down the problem? (Oh, I suppose I could run the bboard daemon with debugging on.... yuck!) Bob
nsb@THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM (Nathaniel Borenstein) (10/29/90)
Are you sure they aren't ancient messages that are just now showing up? In general, this is a symptom of a file system probelm -- there are very few circumstances that cause this to happen other than the file system hiccuping, at least, in mid-operation. Such problems, however, should show up on the bb daemon log, as you are aware. A question: how are you becoming aware of the hidden messages? That might help me to guess how/when it is happening. -- Nathaniel
oester+@rchland.ibm.com (Bob Oesterlin) (10/29/90)
I'm sure that they are *not* ancient messages.. I'll give you an example: I post a message to bboard "advisor.foo". About 30 mins later, I check for new messages. I'm subscribed to advisor.foo, so I expect to see my last post. Messages shows me that the folder has new messages, and a check from messages show the folder has new messages, but none are displayed. The .MS.Master/Update file has been updated, and the message is indeed in the folder. (I cd ~bboard/.MESSAGES/advisor/foo). I can then make the message appear by a "scavenge" of the bboard. Is this any help? Bob
nsb@THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM (Nathaniel Borenstein) (10/30/90)
Excerpts from internet.info-andrew: 29-Oct-90 Re: "old hidden messages" i.. Bob Oesterlin@rchland.ib (581) > I post a message to bboard "advisor.foo". About 30 mins later, I check > for new messages. I'm subscribed to advisor.foo, so I expect to see my > last post. Messages shows me that the folder has new messages, and a > check from messages show the folder has new messages, but none are > displayed. The .MS.Master/Update file has been updated, and the message > is indeed in the folder. (I cd ~bboard/.MESSAGES/advisor/foo). I can then make the message appear by a "scavenge" of the bboard. This sounds very suspicious to me. When the bboard is in the bad state -- i.e. you can't see the new messages until you run a scavenge -- is there a file in that directory called ".AMS_DIRMOD"? If there is such a file, it means that things are working "right" in some sense -- the operation of adding a message to the folder was aborted, but the marker file was left around to tell the system to auto-scavenge eventually. If there is no such file, there's really a bug somewhere. Can you reproduce the circumstances in which this happens? Has anything changed recently to correspond to the advent of this bug (e.g. new hardware, new OS, new Andrew patchlevel, etc.)? In particular, you might look to see if there are any weird protections set on the relevant .MS_MsgDir files, or anything like that, though I can't imagine how that would happen.