Re: Shutdown weirdness.

• Date: Wed, 10 Jan 1996 10:26:55 PST
• From:
  Pavel Curtis <pavel@parc.xerox.com>
• cc: MOO-COWS Mailing List <MOO-Cows.PARC@xerox.com>
• In-Reply-to: "CS Moo Admin's message of \"Tue, 09 Jan 1996 19:04:46 PST\" <Pine.SOL.3.91.960109215849.1063A-100000@seahorse>"

CS Moo Admin writes:
> Recently the machine my MOO is on crashed.  (This is not unusual, it's a 
> Sun.) As usual, the moo caught the shutdown signal and produced a dump.  
> However, the .db.new.#*# file doesn't get renamed to .db.new, so when the 
> machine comes up and calls restart, an old .db.new file gets used. Is 
> this unusal?

No, it's correct.  If the file is still named with #*# at the end, then it is
*not* a complete dump of the database and you should therefore *not* use it.
When UNIX shuts down like that, it doesn't give all of the running processes
arbitrarily long to shut themselves down cleanly.  Instead, after a short
while, it times out and unceremoniously blows away anything still running.
This usually includes the MOO server, since it takes it a while to make a
complete dump.

> To get around it, I added these lines to restart before the 
> "if (-r $1.db.new) then" line:
> 
> if (-r $1.db.new.#*#) then
> 	mv $1.db.new $1.db.new.bkup
> 	mv $1.db.new.#*# $1.db.new
> endif

Don't do this!  Even if the partial DB successfully loads (unlikely), you have
almost certainly lost data.

	Pavel

• Shutdown weirdness.
• From: CS Moo Admin <csmoo@acs.brockport.edu>

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