From: SMTP%"rankin@EQL.CALTECH.EDU" 22-APR-1994 09:19:03.04 To: EVERHART CC: Subj: Re: News expiry & defragging Message-Id: <9404220536.AA26998@uu7.psi.com> Date: Thu, 21 Apr 1994 14:30:00 PDT Reply-To: Pat Rankin Sender: ANU-NEWS Discussion From: Pat Rankin Organization: California Institute of Technology Subject: Re: News expiry & defragging To: Multiple recipients of list ANU-NEWS In article <1994Apr21.142039.62651@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>,\ sloane@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu (Bob Sloane) writes... [...] > While it may be possible to use search lists for NEWS_DEVICE, I would > approach the project with caution, since there are a number of things > that could go wrong. One such potential problem which hasn't been mentioned yet is a VAXCRTL bug dealing with RMS search lists. The C functions access(), chmod(), and chown() call a common support function which calls SYS$SEARCH(), but the necessary RMS cleanup (via a NAM$M_SYNCHK call to SYS$PARSE()) does not get performed. The result is a leak in open channels for the process, and an application which runs long enough will eventually start getting seemingly spurious file open failures due to quota exhaustion. I'm not sure whether an N element search list will lose 1 or N-1 channels each time this happens, or whether having a different device in each element is a prerequisite. I don't know off hand whether NEWS uses any of the three offending functions, but given its unholy mixture of C RTL i/o with direct RMS calls, I wouldn't be surprised if it does. This particular VAXCRTL bug was fixed in VMS 6.0, but that doesn't help folks running 5.x... Pat Rankin, rankin@eql.caltech.edu