Hello Janis.

03 Nov 02 22:19, you wrote to Rick Van Ruth:

 >>>> Nlmaint and maybe other compilers don't have that technical
 >>>> limitation.
 >>>> Perhaps its time some people got rid of Makenl, its obviously not
 >>>> up to FTSC standards.

 >>> NLMaint has caused a variety of problems - unpredictably.

 >> User error?

 JK> No :)  From what I understand, the dos version is very bad and doesn't
 JK> process segments correctly, and I've heard that it drops regions.

Were you able to figure out what causes it to "act" funny?

 JK> The Linux version I am running worked fine for me in the begining,
 JK> then randomly would not process new segments that came in from RCs.
 JK> Sometimes it would drop whole regions from the nodelist.

 JK> I got around that problem by having my script copy all new segments
 JK> into nlmaints' Inbound directory, running it in test mode to move them
 JK> into the Update directory, and then touching files in the update
 JK> directory and in the Master directory before the zone 1 list run on
 JK> Tuesday nights, and the thursday nodediff run. In recent weeks and
 JK> months, there was no problem at all with it. The problems I mentioned
 JK> happened perhaps a year ago..

So it has been running fine for a year, then in all likely hood, there arn't 
problems with NLMAKE, but possibly with what it gets fed?

 JK> Then, this Tuesday's Zone 1 segment was created for the other zones,
 JK> and my own listings in net 261 (1:261/38 and 1:261/100) were
 JK> missing..as though my RC had submitted a segment from a period before
 JK> I moved to that region in June (he hadn't done that though) :(  There
 JK> may have been other errors in that zone list, but this one is the one
 JK> that I've heard about 

 JK> I didn't notice that error, but was made aware of it by one of my
 JK> downlinks from Z2 on Friday afternoon, well after the Thursday
 JK> nodediff run.

 JK> This thursday, around the time the nodediff should have been processed
 JK> on my system, I was curious because I was on my bbs checking mail, and
 JK> didn't get the normal, "Nodelist.298 has been updated to
Nodelist.305"
 JK> message from my bbs..

 JK> I stopped all the cron jobs so I could check the nodediff before it
 JK> got sent out all over zone 1, and took a look.. NlMaint had an
 JK> erroneous date (sometime in 2001, not this Friday's date in 2002), and
 JK> the wrong CRC on the diff, and that's why my bbs's nodelist compiler
 JK> wouldn't apply the diff.

 JK> I removed all the *305 files from nlmaint's subdirectories, and ran my
 JK> nodelist/nodediff script again manually.. this time, it created a
 JK> perfect Zone 1 segment, and a perfect diff.. as far as I know, at
 JK> least.  I haven't heard of any problems down the line :)

 JK> So.. it can be flukey.. I'll be watching it very carefully in the next
 JK> few weeks 

Very strange......

Russell

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