*BSD News Article 50002


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From: pete@inquo.net (Pete Kruckenberg)
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: INN sharedactive.patch problems with FreeBSD 2.0.5R
Date: 25 Aug 1995 20:11:04 GMT
Organization: inQuo Internet (801) 530-7160
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Distribution: world
Message-ID: <41laoo$ajq@xymox.dsw.com>
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Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au news.software.nntp:15391 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:5259

Jacques Caron (jcaron@pressimage.net) wrote:
: In article <410j0i$lr1@xymox.dsw.com>, pete@inquo.net (Pete Kruckenberg) wrote:

: >I put inn1.4unoff-2 on my FreeBSD 2.0.5R machine last night, and 
: >everything worked but the patch for nnrpd that allows it to use shared 
: >memory to share the active file. Whenever nnrpd would be activated, it 
: >would die with a signal 12 (bad argument to system call).
: >
: >Does anyone have nnrpd running with this patch on FreeBSD (or any other 
: >BSD4.4-based system)? Anyone have any ideas what might be causing this 
: >problem? What's the best/easiest way to debug a daemon like this?

: Did you activate the SYSVSHM and SYSVSEM options when building your kernel?

OK, I missed that one. I did put these into the kernel, and now it runs. 
However, it seems to be quite unstable. For instance, I had 8 
simultaneous NNRP sessions going. I then killed the NNRP sessions (*not* 
nnrpd, but the session on the remote host). This locked up nnrpd. This 
was with XSEM_UNDO as both 0 and SEM_UNDO.

Has anyone had good experiences running this on any platform? It seems 
quite unstable to me? I think that the whole semaphore thing might need 
to be re-done somehow, to allow some kind of recovery without having to 
reboot the news server. How about using a timer of some sort, or a file, 
so that the semaphore can be over-ridden if necessary? Or, could it 
possibly be rewritten to have just one write-access nnrpd session, which 
updates the shared memory, and the rest are read-only?

I'll look into these possibilities, but I'd like to hear the experiences 
and ideas of other people.

Pete Kruckenberg
pete@inquo.net