inn-2.4.2 makehistory weirdness

[Kathryn Hemness]

Greetings --

I've been building a new news server on a Sun V240 running Solaris 9 this week
which was going very smoothly until yesterday when I attempted the first
makehistory.  I believe the version I am building is inn-2.4.2 but I'm not
sure (it is inn-2.4.? which was the STABLE snapshot of 6/4/2004).

I had built and had been running this version on a Solaris 8 system
since early June without problems and I had no trouble with the
installation besides having to add quotation marks to the inn.conf
file and commenting out parameters having no set values.

Needless to say, I didn't expect makehistory problems on the Solaris 9 system.

On the Solaris 9 system, makehistory got the following error:

  makehistory: cannot initialize storage manager: one or more storage methods failed initialization: No such file or directory

/usr/adm/messages showed a little more information:

makehistory[13083]: [ID 371779 news.error] SM storage method 'cnfs' failed initialization
makehistory[13083]: [ID 292155 news.error] SM one or more storage methods failed initialization
makehistory[13165]: [ID 776734 news.error] CNFS-sm: CNFSflushhead: attempted flush whilst read only

I truss'ed makehistory and found that the CNFS buffers were all stat'ed but that
it opened the first buffer read-only.

After spending considerable checking for *.conf file settings, file-permissions,
and ownership problems of the cnfs buffer files, the buffindexed overview files,
and all other files in the news path, I was stumped; all permissions and ownerships
were correct and there were no missing files.

As a shot in the dark, I copied the makehistory binaries from the Solaris 8 inn-2.4.2
test system and the makehistory from a Solaris 8 inn-2.3.4 server
to the Solaris 9 box and typed makehistory....Both times the makehistory command worked.
So then, I decided to put back the original makehistory file and run it; this time
it was successful.

I can only conclude that the makehistory compiled on other systems was able
to do something to the CNFS buffer files to make them R-W accessible to
makehistory.

On the Solaris 8 systems, the gcc compiler is gcc version 2.95.2 19991024 (release)
and on the Solaris 9 system, the gcc compiler is gcc version 3.4.0.

Has anyone else seen similar behavior and should I expect other problems from
gcc version 3.4.0?


--kathy