Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!lll-winken!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!tektronix!sequent!mntgfx!dclemans
From: dclemans@mentor.com (Dave Clemans @ APD x1292)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: Need help with rn/bnews on Apollos
Message-ID: <1989Aug17.164453.9776@mentor.com>
Date: 17 Aug 89 16:44:53 GMT
References: <203@digi.UUCP>
Organization: engr
Lines: 23

From article <203@digi.UUCP>, by kcantrel@digi.UUCP (Keith Cantrell):
> I have run into a problem with running rn when rnews or rn is already running
> on a different machine.  The problem is the first one will open the file
> "/usr/lib/news/active" for reading and therefore the Apollo operating system
> will lock it.  After this has happens, I am unable to get a second rn or rnews
> to run on a different machine, the fopen complains "Text file busy".  This
> problem does not exist if both programs are running on the same machine.
> 
> This was a major problem when I started up rn on my machine and rnews was
> started up on a different machine and started loosing news since it could not
> open the active file :-(
> 

What I've done is to modify rn, vn, etc. to access an "active.copy" file
instead of the "active" file.  A cron job runs every 15 minutes to copy
"active" to "active.copy".  Thus all the news reader programs, and their
read locks don't interfere with news reception.

For rn specifically, I modified it to not always keep the active file open
(otherwise the cron job that copies "active" to "active.copy" would have
problems).

dgc