Upgrade to INN 2.5 and history problem

Julien ÉLIE julien at trigofacile.com
Thu Jun 5 19:24:55 UTC 2008


Hi Russ,

>> He successfully managed to upgrade two news servers.  But the third does
>> not work:  he tried twice and when he starts rc.news, he has:
>>
>>     May 15 02:43:19 news innd: can't ftello /var/news/db/history Value too large for defined data type
>
> This is the generic error message returned by the dbz layer when it fails
> to open a dbz database.  It may mean what it says, but it's also quite
> possible that it's some entirely different problem.

It was in fact a Perl problem because if he compiled without Perl support
his INN, there was no problem at all.


> A debugging build will enable a bunch of debugging output that will help
> track down the problem.  Figuring it out short of that tends to be
> annoying.

Sure.  INN 2.5 did not even compile with "make warnings" (which also does
generates a debugging build, thanks to "-DDEBUG=1").  And we found out
the problem with that:

perl.c: In function `HandleHeaders':
perl.c:135: warning: comparison of unsigned expression >= 0 is always true
make[2]: *** [perl.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [all-nnrpd] Error 2
make: *** [warnings] Error 2


The problem was solved with the last sources of Perl 5.10.  Well, it appears
he was using a broken version of Perl.
Sorry for having bothered the list with that but it is worth remembering
the problem can come out of Perl itself.

Regards,

-- 
Julien ÉLIE

« Mon père, ce héros au sourire si doux. » (Victor Hugo) 



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