🚀 go-pugleaf

lipton@odin.m2c.org (Gary Lipton) wrote:
} I had nn running fine for a couple of weeks (under ULTRIX)
} but now I can't seem to keep nnmaster running.  It goes for a while,
} but it doesn't finish updating the groups.  Nothing that I know
} of has changed.  I've tried reinstalling, but it doesn't help.
} Any suggestions?

It sounds like you've either got an old version of nn (pre-v6.3.6), or
there is another database bug to be found.  In either case, you can track
down the problem using the following tactics:

Do an "ls -t" of the nn/db/DATA directory to discover which data file was
last updated by nnmaster.  The group causing the trouble will be the first
group with new news after this one.  For example, if the list shows:

	/usr/spool/nn/db/DATA>l -t
	total 1426
	-rw-rw-r--  1 news          136 Feb 12 17:56 277.x
	-rw-rw-r--  1 news         2183 Feb 12 17:56 277.d

then the last group to be sucessfully updated was group 277 (0-relative).
Check the GROUPS file in nn/db on line 278 (1-relative, it's a text file)
to discover which one it is, and which groups immediately follow it.  You
can then cd to the offending group, and examine the latest news that came
in for corruption.  The most likely cause is a header that is too long or
mangled in some way (the body of the article shouldn't matter).

If you have a pre-6.3.6 version of nn, you still have a bug in the name
compression routine that will cause nn to crash when the name header is
longer than 256 (or so) bytes.  You can get an update to fix it so that
this doesn't happen in the future.
-- 
Wayne Davison          \  /| / /| \/ /| /(_)         davison@drivax.UUCP
                      (_)/ |/ /\| / / |/  \          ...!amdahl!drivax!davison