Slash

Hi folks, 

I've spotted an unusual bug which you may be interested in - or you may be able to see
where I am going wrong.

With my Slash 2.0.0 site I can create new articles using the admin interface as
my admin user. I can hit the "save" button without hitting "preview" first.
This seems to work - the article appears in the list afterwards but doesn't appear
on the home page - ever!



If I submit stories as different users and then use the admin user to approve the
posting  then it seems to work ok.

Any more debugging info I should collect to help track this problem down?



Alex


=====
Alex McLintock        alex@...    Open Source Consultancy in London
OpenWeb Analysts Ltd, http://www.OWAL.co.uk/ 
DR WHO COMPETITION: http://www.diversebooks.com/cgi-bin/caption/captions.cgi?date=200104
Get Your XML T-Shirt <t-shirt/> at http://www.inversity.co.uk/

____________________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get your free @yahoo.co.uk address at http://mail.yahoo.co.uk
or your free @yahoo.ie address at http://mail.yahoo.ie

yodermk@... (Micah Yoder) writes:

>   331 ?        Z      0:00 [slashd <defunct>]
>   332 ?        Z      0:00 [slashd <defunct>]
>   343 ?        Z      0:00 [slashd <defunct>]
> 
> ....
> 
> much, much, much snippage of more of the same

Yeah;  it's my bug in slashd, doesn't reap its children properly.

Earlier I told someone this was harmless.  That's only sorta true.
When I got up to 256 zombie children my Red Hat system refused to
fork more and dailyStuff/moderatord stopped running.  So it's
probably a good idea to restart slashd every 25 days or less...

/etc/init.d/slash restart

(or on my Red Hat system)

/etc/rc.d/init.d/slash restart

Putting it in root cron to run twice a month might not be the worst
idea.

This is all totally fixed in fry (slashd has been totally rewritten)
and it's probably not going to be addressed in bender until fry is
released.  My fault.  Sorry.
--
 Jamie McCarthy
 jamie@...

--- Micah Yoder <yodermk@...> wrote: 
> [root@... logs]# ps ax | grep slash | wc -l
>     608
> 
> [root@... logs]# ps ax | grep slash
>   977 ?        S      0:00 su -c /usr/local/slash/sbin/slashd travtalk nobody
>   980 ?        S      9:53 /usr/bin/perl -w /usr/local/slash/sbin/slashd 
> travtal32674 ?        S      0:00 su -c /usr/local/slash/sbin/slashd 
> jesusgeeks gregday32678 ?        S      0:29 /usr/bin/perl -w 
> /usr/local/slash/sbin/slashd jesusge32680 ?        Z      0:00 [slashd 
> <defunct>]
> 32681 ?        Z      0:00 [slashd <defunct>]
> 32722 ?        Z      0:00 [slashd <defunct>]


I'm pretty certain that these zombie slashd processes have been discussed before
on this mailing list. Perhaps some searhcing the archives will help.

I think the upshot of this is that you don't have to worry about it -
so long as they don't fill up your process table - hopefully they aren't
taking up more resources.


Advert:

http://news.DiverseBooks.com is my slash site for SF and Computing book news

Alex


=====
Alex McLintock        alex@...    Open Source Consultancy in London
OpenWeb Analysts Ltd, http://www.OWAL.co.uk/ 
DR WHO COMPETITION: http://www.diversebooks.com/cgi-bin/caption/captions.cgi?date=200104
Get Your XML T-Shirt <t-shirt/> at http://www.inversity.co.uk/

____________________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get your free @yahoo.co.uk address at http://mail.yahoo.co.uk
or your free @yahoo.ie address at http://mail.yahoo.ie

> Yeah;  it's my bug in slashd, doesn't reap its children properly.
>
> Earlier I told someone this was harmless.  That's only sorta true.
> When I got up to 256 zombie children my Red Hat system refused to
> fork more and dailyStuff/moderatord stopped running.  So it's
> probably a good idea to restart slashd every 25 days or less...

Interesting.  I had 608 children, and they were being produced at about one a 
minute.  Fortunately a killall slashd fixed it up pretty quick.

It actually was kind of our fault here -- we were using the wrong values for 
some of the variables in vars table!

My travtalk slashd was running for well over 2 weeks and I had no zombies 
with it.

That also was the cause of the e-mail problem I posted a couple days ago.  
Basically, a few more things were different than I thought.

> /etc/init.d/slash restart

hmm, I start it from /etc/rc.local.  Maybe I should get the scripts....

> This is all totally fixed in fry (slashd has been totally rewritten)
> and it's probably not going to be addressed in bender until fry is
> released.  My fault.  Sorry.

Cool.  BTW, speaking of fry, it would be interesting to see a Slashcode story 
about it -- what to expect, current status, ease of migration, pleas for 
help, whatever.  I'd like to know where it is.

Thanks for all the work,
Micah

-- 
Like to travel?                        http://TravTalk.org
Micah Yoder Internet Development       http://yoderdev.com

Micah Yoder wrote:
> Cool.  BTW, speaking of fry, it would be interesting to see a Slashcode story
> about it -- what to expect, current status, ease of migration, pleas for
> help, whatever.  I'd like to know where it is.
Its not alpha yet, so not much word about it. We have no date for giving
out a
tarball yet. 

Outside of just a handful of folks who I know of (mainly the slash team,
along
with one or two others) I know of no one running it. And it certainly is
not
ready for production quite yet.

It has Slash::Messages, more XML, new features in journals, faster
comments,
new features for submitters. Not sure if anyone has a full list of all
of 
what it does. The biggest issue in upgrading will be moving your
comments from the old comment tables to the new ones.
	-Brian

alexmc@... (Alex McLintock) writes:

> With my Slash 2.0.0 site I can create new articles using the
> admin interface as my admin user. I can hit the "save" button
> without hitting "preview" first. This seems to work - the
> article appears in the list afterwards but doesn't appear on the
> home page - ever!
> 
> If I submit stories as different users and then use the admin
> user to approve the posting  then it seems to work ok.
> 
> Any more debugging info I should collect to help track this
> problem down?

Well, first, make sure slashd is running.  That would also have
the symptoms you describe.

I'm not aware of a bug involving clicking Save without Preview.
I believe the bug is actually that viewing a story with article.pl
or comments.pl, before slashd gets a chance to write it into the
newstories table (see slashd's freshenup() subroutine), will clear
its writestatus field.

In Slash.pm's selectComments() I see it calling
setStory({writestatus => 0}).  That code really needs to be
surrounded by an if() to make sure it doesn't happen every single
dang time someone views a story's comments...I'm not exactly sure
of the extent of this bug but I think it's what's keeping your
story from displaying.

The workaround is, in admin.pl after you Save a story, wait five
minutes before you view it with article.pl by clicking on its
subject in the story listing.  Clicking on its number to edit it
with admin.pl is still OK.

The fix for already-broken stories is to update them, and then,
again, not to look at them with article.pl for five minutes.
Or, if that doesn't work, go into mysql and

UPDATE stories SET writestatus=1 WHERE sid='your/story/sid';

and within the next five minutes slashd should fix it.

This is fixed in fry (and I'm today in the process of fixing it even
better than it was already fixed :).
--
 Jamie McCarthy
 jamie@...

On Thursday 05 July 2001 16:48, you wrote:

> Its not alpha yet, so not much word about it. We have no date for giving
> out a
> tarball yet.

I don't suppose you have any reasonable guess as to a date for a stable, 
non-beta release?  As in, this year or first quarter next year...?  I know, 
it will be released "when it's ready." Just looking for an educated guess.

> It has Slash::Messages, more XML, new features in journals, faster
> comments,
> new features for submitters. Not sure if anyone has a full list of all

sounds good.

> of
> what it does. The biggest issue in upgrading will be moving your
> comments from the old comment tables to the new ones.

there will be a script for that right?  :-)

-- 
Like to travel?                        http://TravTalk.org
Micah Yoder Internet Development       http://yoderdev.com

Micah Yoder wrote:
> I don't suppose you have any reasonable guess as to a date for a stable,
> non-beta release?  As in, this year or first quarter next year...?  I know,
> it will be released "when it's ready." Just looking for an educated guess.
Target date of getting it installed on slashdot in early August. But
getting it on slashdot and releasing are two different things.
A release will have some upgrade scripts to go from 2.0-2.2, and
will have a few other fixes in it. If you follow CVS (and
kepp up with CVS) my guess is that you will get a fairly
bug free version in early september.

> > what it does. The biggest issue in upgrading will be moving your
> > comments from the old comment tables to the new ones.
> there will be a script for that right?  :-)
Well, I need a script like that, slashcode, use.perl and
a host of other sites need it, so it will probably happen :)
A fully released version would have such a script.

	-Brian

-- 
_______________________________________________________
Brian Aker, brian@... 
Slashdot Senior Developer
Seattle, Washington
http://tangent.org/~brian/
http://slashdot.org/
_______________________________________________________
You can't grep a dead tree.

On Thursday 05 July 2001 21:00, you wrote:

> Target date of getting it installed on slashdot in early August. But

hmm.  I'd expect a release BEFORE running Slashdot on it.  Oh well.

> kepp up with CVS) my guess is that you will get a fairly
> bug free version in early september.

Cool.  Just wondering, partly because I'm thinking of building a completely 
different kind of application using as much of the Slash code as possible ... 
something warped beyond recognition.  And I might as well wait for the new 
version if it will happen anytime soon.  I'm not sure if I'll wait until 
September, but it might be worth it...

> > > what it does. The biggest issue in upgrading will be moving your
> > > comments from the old comment tables to the new ones.
> >
> > there will be a script for that right?  :-)
>
> Well, I need a script like that, slashcode, use.perl and
> a host of other sites need it, so it will probably happen :)
> A fully released version would have such a script.

Great, thanks.

-- 
Like to travel?                        http://TravTalk.org
Micah Yoder Internet Development       http://yoderdev.com

At 18:07 -0400 2001.07.05, Micah Yoder wrote:
>On Thursday 05 July 2001 21:00, you wrote:
>
>> Target date of getting it installed on slashdot in early August. But
>
>hmm.  I'd expect a release BEFORE running Slashdot on it.  Oh well.

Well, our dilemma is that we are using all our resources to get Slashdot
running the new code.  This means that installation procedures,
documentation, and cleaning up for general use are being neglected while
working code is being emphasized.  It is more a time issue than anything
else.  We'd love to get it all out as a release first, but there just isn't
time to get those "little" things ready.

-- 
Chris Nandor                      pudge@...    http://pudge.net/
Open Source Development Network    pudge@...     http://osdn.com/