Hello Rick,

>>> 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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take care,
Janis

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