From: utzoo!decvax!pur-ee!malcolm Newsgroups: net.notes Title: Notes Pointers FUBARED - (nf) Article-I.D.: pur-ee.491 Posted: Thu Aug 5 18:33:20 1982 Received: Sun Aug 8 06:16:05 1982 #N:pur-ee:13000005:000:1411 pur-ee!malcolm Aug 5 18:29:00 1982 One of our notesfiles just got hosed up. I tried to delete the offending notes (reading them caused core dumps) but the pointers were all screwed up so I finally had to remake the notesfile. Recovering all the stuff that came in between the crash and when I fixed it was more difficult. Luckily it was a local (just two machines) newsgroup so I just resubmitted everything as one article. This isn't possible for the net.* articles since notes would then send them back to news and to the rest of world. (Imagine paying to receive the same garbage twice.) I can't think of any way to recover network wide news. I'm not sure what the solution is. There are some real problems with the lock files!!!! Every day or two we lose a lock file and I have to go in by hand and remove them. There is also a note in the comments to nfcompress saying that no one should be in the notesfile when the compress happens, but I can't imagine how this would screw up the pointers. Besides we only compress every Sunday night at 3:30AM. I can't imagine how the pointers got screwed up. The only time they should change is if two processes are writing a note at the same time. (multiple rnews at once are very common on this system). This is the second time this problem has happened here. Has anybody else seen these problems, have any ideas for error recovery, or have the time to start digging? Malcolm