CSuite - Community Networking System

CSuite Workshop - October 29, 1997

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Topics:

This week's Workshop became a troubleshooting session. While some of the items were specifically CCN related, successful fixes will be rolled into future CSuite releases, and may become available as patches.

IP Install under tshell

More reports are arising about inability to install IP files under tshell.

We looked at the install process, discovered a script called info_install, and a trace showed that info_install was testing an empty variable as directory and getting TRUE, so the routine was taking the wrong branch. A test for empty string corrected the problem.

However, there were other permission related problems, and so tshell users were moved from group uccn to group tshell.

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System Load

In testing the IP install, we found the system load very high, and upon investigation found that we seemed to have more than one instance of the installdirs process running. As this is very disk intensive, depending heavily on find, the first instance had not finished by the time the next was scheduled.

The quick fix was to add a process lock, and prevent the new instance from running if the previous process still had the lock.

We need to redesign this process so that it is less resource intensive. Reducing the frequency of regenerating the database would help.

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LUpdate editor

We concluded that putting the temporary edit file in the current directory, generally an IP directory, rather than in the user's home files or /tmp, would be helpful for security and write access, and also keep /tmp cleaner :)

Another change would save the backup file as ~ in the target directory, avoiding permission problems, since the user will have editing permissions.

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TShell Time Guarantees

Discussion of complaints about long blackouts led us to examine the code, and decide that a change was in order. It turns out that if a user is online for a short time, the blackout period is adjusted by the ratio of time used/guarantee.

However, when tshell allowed the user to stay on a long time, the same ratio was applied, thus in some cases doubling or tripling the blackout period. We added code to limit the "short session blackout credit" so that it only applied to short, not long sessions.

We also adjusted the time tables for a maximum blackout of 10 minutes, until we have more experience. The table was also cleaned up.

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CSuite Workshop Mailing List   csuite-dev@chebucto.ns.ca  List Archive  
Editorial comments to   aa146@chebucto.ns.ca  Ed Dyer  
Workshop Coordinator   djm@chebucto.ns.ca  David J Murdoch
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