• Problem tossing mail

    From Alan Ianson@1:153/757 to All on Sat Jan 5 00:46:42 2019
    Hello All,

    I'm having a problem tossing mail. Sometimes when I run "./bbbs bogus w" I see..

    Message base locked (/bbbs/work/bbsrun.c exists), waiting...

    In fact bbsrun.c does exist along with serveral 0 byte .tmp files in the work directory. I need to delete it to continue tossing incoming mail until the next
    time I get the above.

    Has anyone else seen this and/or have any advice for getting inbound mail to toss without getting the above error?

    --- BBBS/Li6 v4.10 Toy-3
    * Origin: The Rusty MailBox - Penticton, BC Canada (1:153/757)
  • From mark lewis@1:3634/12.73 to Alan Ianson on Sat Jan 5 06:24:56 2019

    On 2019 Jan 05 00:46:42, you wrote to All:

    Message base locked (/bbbs/work/bbsrun.c exists), waiting...

    i ran into something similar with another system the other day... after manually cleaning up, i found out that i should have searched the logs more to find out what caused those new outbound pkts to be left in the temp directory... in my case, it was a routed netmail with files attached and the files didn't arrive here so the tosser was erroring out and leaving everything behind... instead of spending ""some time"" cleaning up the temp directory and manually creating the flo files to carry those pkts to their proper destination, i should have just removed that one netmail msg and let the tosser
    run again and it would have completed its task...

    i don't know how bbbs logs or if you are on *nix but i have increased my syslog
    retention so i could have time to go back and hunt down anomalies days or weeks
    later...

    tldr; do the logs indicate why that file was left behind and the processing didn't complete properly?

    )\/(ark

    Always Mount a Scratch Monkey
    Do you manage your own servers? If you are not running an IDS/IPS yer doin' it wrong...
    ... Canned mackeral: It's a giant sardine and it's real gross. - Neekha
    ---
    * Origin: (1:3634/12.73)
  • From Alan Ianson@1:153/757 to mark lewis on Sat Jan 5 05:33:00 2019
    i don't know how bbbs logs or if you are on *nix but i have increased my syslo >retention so i could have time to go back and hunt down anomalies days or week
    later...

    I am running slackware and I haven't deleted any logs yet (it's a new install).
    I will add the logs to logrotate at some point. I usually keep 30 days of logs.

    BBBS writes classic logs. Mailer sessions are logged in each nodes log and utilities like bogus (the tosser/scanner) log to log0.

    tldr; do the logs indicate why that file was left behind and the processing didn't complete properly?

    No, the log0 just logs one line like this..

    181231 21:15 Message base locked

    I run "bbbs bogus w" from the gotmail.bz script. Whenever bbbs or bbbsd get new
    mail it runs the gotmail script. It's worked well for me on this installation since Dec 15. 181231 is the first mention of Message base locked that I see in my logs. gotmail.bz is a compiled script. By default it touches gotmail.flg. I
    added the "bbbs bogus w" command to the script as suggested in the sysop.txt. Here is my gotmail.bz..

    ---- begin ----
    int main() {
    int f;
    if ((f=fopen(sprintf("%sgotmail.flg",bg_tempdir),"wb"))!=-1) fclose(f);
    system("bbbs bogus w",0,0);
    }
    ---- end ----

    --- BBBS/Li6 v4.10 Toy-3
    * Origin: The Rusty MailBox - Penticton, BC Canada (1:153/757)
  • From mark lewis@1:3634/12.73 to Alan Ianson on Sat Jan 5 09:21:30 2019

    On 2019 Jan 05 05:33:00, you wrote to me:

    i don't know how bbbs logs or if you are on *nix but i have increased my
    syslo retention so i could have time to go back and hunt down anomalies
    days or week later...

    I am running slackware and I haven't deleted any logs yet (it's a new install). I will add the logs to logrotate at some point. I usually keep
    30
    days of logs.

    on our ubuntu servers, our (non-bbbs) setup logs to syslog and that's where we have to monitor/grep to see what the main part of the bbs is doing... some additional parts log to their own log files outside of syslog but not many...

    BBBS writes classic logs. Mailer sessions are logged in each nodes log
    and utilities like bogus (the tosser/scanner) log to log0.

    ahhh... ok, so it doesn't use the logging facility on the system? i know that there is a way for it to write to individual logs but i rarely ever change it to do that...

    tldr; do the logs indicate why that file was left behind and the
    processing didn't complete properly?

    No, the log0 just logs one line like this..

    181231 21:15 Message base locked

    ahhh... and there's nothing further back indicating an abort or exiting error condition?

    )\/(ark

    Always Mount a Scratch Monkey
    Do you manage your own servers? If you are not running an IDS/IPS yer doin' it wrong...
    ... Clear out, or I'll set the cats on you
    ---
    * Origin: (1:3634/12.73)
  • From Alan Ianson@1:153/757 to mark lewis on Sat Jan 5 15:24:22 2019
    181231 21:15 Message base locked

    ahhh... and there's nothing further back indicating an abort or exiting error condition?

    Not that I have seen. I'm looking at all this now so I'll have a closer look at
    the logs too.

    So far it looks like using the gotmail.bz script is not going to work for me so
    I will need to find another way to toss mail. Maybe I'll run a cron job periodically.

    --- BBBS/Li6 v4.10 Toy-3
    * Origin: The Rusty MailBox - Penticton, BC Canada (1:153/757)
  • From Janis Kracht@1:261/38 to Alan Ianson on Sun Jan 6 13:34:04 2019
    Hi Alan,

    Hope you had a great Christmas and New Year!

    181231 21:15 Message base locked

    ahhh... and there's nothing further back indicating an abort or exiting error >> condition?

    Not that I have seen. I'm looking at all this now so I'll have a closer look a
    the logs too.

    So far it looks like using the gotmail.bz script is not going to work for me s
    I will need to find another way to toss mail. Maybe I'll run a cron job periodically.

    I use a cron job here as below:

    */10 * * * * /home/bbbs/mailin.sh
    */16 * * * * /home/bbbs/mailout.sh

    Here's the content of mailin.sh:
    #!/bin/sh
    cd /home/bbbs
    ./bbbs bogus w > /dev/null 2>&1
    ./bbbs btick > /dev/null 2>&1
    exit

    Here's the content of mailout.sh:
    #!/bin/sh
    cd /home/bbbs
    ./bbbs bogus r > /dev/null 2>&1
    exit

    Hope this helps :)

    Take care,
    Janis

    --- BBBS/Li6 v4.10 Toy-3
    * Origin: Prism bbs (1:261/38)
  • From Alan Ianson@1:153/757 to Janis Kracht on Mon Jan 7 04:13:10 2019
    Here's the content of mailout.sh:
    #!/bin/sh
    cd /home/bbbs
    ./bbbs bogus r > /dev/null 2>&1
    exit

    Hope this helps :)

    It does, thanks agian..

    I did that a while ago following your example. Saved me a lot of typing already.. :)

    --- BBBS/Li6 v4.10 Toy-3
    * Origin: The Rusty MailBox - Penticton, BC Canada (1:153/757)
  • From Robert Wolfe@1:116/18.2 to Alan Ianson on Thu Jan 17 15:39:14 2019
    I'm having a problem tossing mail. Sometimes when I run "./bbbs bogus w" I see..

    Message base locked (/bbbs/work/bbsrun.c exists), waiting...

    In fact bbsrun.c does exist along with serveral 0 byte .tmp files in the work
    directory. I need to delete it to continue tossing incoming mail until the nex
    time I get the above.

    I find that deleting the bbbsrun.c file will help to get things going more often than not.

    --- BBBS/2 v4.10 Toy-3
    * Origin: Omicron Theta/2 * Southaven MS * winserver.org (1:116/18.2)