Re: stable innd is segfaulting

[cjw44@cam.ac.uk (Colin Watson)]

cjw44@cam.ac.uk (Colin Watson) wrote:
>I'm encountering a really strange problem on a friend's slink box. We
>were trying to fix a few things in his news configuration - rebuilding
>suck with perl support and fiddling about with a few configuration files
>(like newsfeeds - 'ctlinnd checkfile' is happy, BTW). Suddenly suck
>stopped working, which understandably irritated us a bit. Putting all
>the configuration files back to (as far as we can remember) the way they
>were and reinstalling the original suck package doesn't help.
>
>Eventually I traced the problem to innd itself dying when innxmit tries
>to submit articles to it. The tail of an strace looks like this
>(apologies for the long lines):

[snip SIGSEGV]

>I've tried reading the source, but my knowledge of the internals of innd
>is not that deep and I'm stumped. Has anyone encountered this problem
>before, and even better do they know how to fix it? It happens in both
>streaming and non-streaming mode, and after restarting the server. I'm
>going to try rebuilding the active, history, and overview files now, but
>their format looks generally OK.

That didn't help, but the next day I zapped all of suck's batch files
that had piled up and things seemed to work OK (and continue to do so).
I don't think I should have been able to get innd to segfault under any
circumstances, though, and I'm concerned that it could happen again. I'd
report this as a bug if I (a) could replicate it and (b) had some idea
of what on earth was going on ...

-- 
Colin Watson                                           [cjw44@cam.ac.uk]