Problems after crash due to power break

[Russ Allbery]

Rejo Zenger <subs=inn-workers at rz.xs4all.nl> writes:

> As a result of a powerbreak my newsserver has crashed yesterday. Upon
> booting the system (it didn't came up deliberatly) I've checked the
> discs, revealing some filesystem errors. These have been fixed.

> Now, INN seems to be up and running again, except for the fact that some
> articles that were previously in the spool, seem to have been gone. They
> are no longer listed in the db-files, although I guess the article is
> still in the spool (there is no reason to suppose they are gone, the
> CNFS buffers are calculated to allowe an expiry of several years).

They probably aren't still in the spool; since they didn't show up with
makehistory, I doubt they are, or at least their bitmap entries were never
written.  CNFS only flushes to disk periodically, not after every write,
so a crash with CNFS buffers can result in lost articles (tradspool
doesn't have this problem).

I want to try to make CNFS a bit more robust in the presence of crashes,
but it's tricky to do that and still keep it fast.  One really doesn't
want to be constantly msyncing everything.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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