Corrupt active file after newgroup control message

[Toon van der Pas]

On Mon, Nov 20, 2006 at 12:30:00PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Toon van der Pas <toon at hout.vanvergehaald.nl> writes:
> 
> > Recently a new problem developed on our news server.  To document the
> > problem I use the last newgroup control message that caused the problem
> > (lots of newgroup control messages get processed correctly).
> 
> > Today at 12:10 pm dutch time we received a newgroup control message:
> 
> > Nov 20 12:10:15 news controlchan[19458]: control_newgroup, finet.binaries.keskustelu.sarjakuvat news at finnet.fi news at finnet.fi @05000000517A00012BA40000000000000000@, 10.0.1.100, doit, 1
> 
> > After processing this message innd stopped:
> 
> > Nov 20 12:10:16 news innd: k:finet.binaries.keskustelu.sarjakuvat:y:news at finnet.fi
> > Nov 20 12:10:16 news innfeed[19459]: ME source lost . Exiting
> > Nov 20 12:10:16 news innfeed[19459]: bit global seconds 73547 offered 0 accepted 0 refused 0 rejected 0 missing 0 accsize 0 rejsize 0 spooled 0 unspooled 0
> > Nov 20 12:10:16 news innfeed[19459]: ME global seconds 73550 offered 0 accepted 0 refused 0 rejected 0 missing 0 accsize 0 rejsize 0 spooled 0 unspooled 0
> > Nov 20 12:10:16 news innfeed[19459]: ME finishing at Mon Nov 20 12:10:16 2006
> 
> > Analysis of the file /usr/local/news/db/active turned up that the
> > group was added there, but that the record was prefixed by 2117 NULL-
> > bytes! See below the last part of the hex dump of the active file:
> 
> Usually this is the kind of thing that happens if the active file
> is edited with a regular editor behind the back of INN without
> throttling the server first.  INN often writes out the active file
> assuming that it knows offsets and file size (and may even be using
> mmap), so if something changes the active file behind its back, it
> will be unaware of those changes and won't adjust accordingly.
> 
> In this case, I would expect these symptoms if someone had deleted
> exactly 2117 characters from the active file without telling INN to
> reload it.

Hi Russ,

Ouch! Your diagnosis hurts.
I never do that and I think I haven't done that recently too.
But I'm willing to believe that I did this silly thing without
realizing it. You know what? I'll monitor it for a while, and if
it happens again (it happened twice already) I'll report in again.

Thanks for the swift reaction.
Our news server is humming along nicely. Ain't life sweet (sometimes)?

Regards,
Toon.