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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)