B news 2.11 patch 18 considered harmful

[Gary S. Trujillo]

In article <1676 at mtunb.ATT.COM> jcm at mtunb.UUCP (was-John McMillan) writes:
> In article <392 at gnosys.UUCP> gst at gnosys.UUCP (Gary S. Trujillo) writes:
> >Recently, the following was posted:
> :
> >...                                                Worse yet, rn goes crazy
> >when there's such a wide article-sequence spread (runs out of memory on my
> >2 meg machine, in fact).
> 
> 	There is little relationship between having 2 Meg of RAM and
> 	running out of memory: Virtual Memory means not having to say
> 	"You're outta RAM" -- you're just out of Virtual Address [VA] space
> 	or out of SWAP space...

Yeah, yeah.  I just left out the details - that's all.  I realize that what
got exhausted was swap space.  Still, my point was that there was a problem
with the situation I encountered.

BTW, the story has a happy ending:  turns out I accidentally let an old
(pre-patch 18) version of rnews deal with a new batch of news.  It didn't
know how to deal with the new-format active file.  Thanks to Gordon Burditt
for putting me on the track of the problem:

|Date: Wed, 4 Oct 89 10:35:05 cdt
|From: ima!harvard!husc6!wuarchive!sneaky!gordon (Gordon Burditt)
|Subject: Re: B news 2.11 patch 18 considered harmful
|In-Reply-To: <392 at gnosys.UUCP>
|Organization: Gordon Burditt
|
|This is the sort of thing I saw while installing patchlevel 18 when I
|accidentally let loose the OLD rnews with the NEW active file format.
|(A batch sort of snuck in during the installation, and rnews is a copy,
|not link, to inews, because they are on different file systems, so
|it was a little slower getting both changed).
|
|Once I cleaned up the mess in the active file, it's been working fine.
|
|					Gordon L. Burditt
|					...!texbell!sneaky!gordon

Same here.  Thanks, Gordon!


-- 
Gary S. Trujillo			      gst at gnosys.svle.ma.us
Somerville, Massachusetts		      {wjh12,spdcc,ima,cdp}!gnosys!gst