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