Re: 2.1.131 Oops

[Phil Brutsche]

On Mon, 7 Dec 1998, Nathan Myers wrote:

[snip oops]
> Incidentally, I found a corruption in a 6M mail archive written
> by Xemacs/vm on 2.1.130; writing again, it came out clean.  Spooky.

In the last two days (since I started using 2.1.131), I've seen similar
corruption.

Sometimes, in Netscape Mail, I'll try to open one of my mail archives, and
Netcape will complain that the mail archive is corrupted.  Opening the
file in Xemacs shows that it's been replaced by ^P characters (should be
just plain text).  Thinking all those messages are lost, I do `cat
/dev/null > filename` to zero out the file, and `sync` to write the
changes to disk.  Then I do something that will clear the page cache (a
kernel compile will do the trick).

Start up Netscape and open the archive again, and everything's all 
hunky-dory (the archive, with all it's contents, has been restored).

The file in question is stored on an IDE disk formated for FAT16, and
mounted as VFAT.  I've never seen this problem with 2.0.34 (stock),
2.0.35 (stock), 2.0.36 (stock), 2.1.129 (stock), and 2.1.130ac2.

The problem happens with 2.1.131ac2 on a Pentium MMX with 64MB of RAM.  It
has 2 IDE drives (3.5GB in 2 partitions as VFAT, 5.1GB as ext2), and a 2GB
SCSI-2 HD (as swap/ext2) powered by a 53c875.

I'll go back to stock 2.1.131 to see if the problem still happens.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Phil Brutsche

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certainly handle Admiral Jellico." - Jean-Luc Picard

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