Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: nsd aborts when restarted after apparently successful openACS installation

2: Re: nsd aborts when restarted after apparently successful openACS installation (response to 1)

Posted by Tilmann Singer on 03/09/03 11:38 AM

Try setting/increasing the stacksize in the nsd config file. There are two occurences of stacksize in the config file and I don't know which one is the right one, thus I have both in mine:

ns_section "ns/parameters"
ns_param StackSize [expr 1024 * 1024]

ns_section "ns/threads"
ns_param stacksize [expr 1024 * 1024]

Could someone who knows it please post the recommended settings? (Maybe also as a comment on http://openacs.org/doc/openacs-4/aolserver.html) Thanks

3: Re: nsd aborts when restarted after apparently successful openACS installation (response to 2)

Posted by John S on 03/09/03 01:49 PM

thanks for the tip, but unfortunately still no luck :(

one thing though... even with the larger stacksize, it still fails at the exact same point...

so there is a problem here...

[snip several hundred lines of output at least...so the server is getting a fair bit of initialisation done before it dies]
[09/Mar/2003:23:07:34][30118.1024][-main-] Debug: Loading packages/acs-mail/tcl/acs-mail-init.tcl...
[09/Mar/2003:23:07:34][30118.1024][-main-] Notice: Scheduling proc acs_mail_process_queue
[09/Mar/2003:23:07:34][30118.1024][-main-] Notice: acs-mail: ns_uuencode works!!
Aborted

i notice that there is supposedly some patch for ns_uuencode to make it work with binary files... could it be a problem with that (in spite of the fact that the message above says ns_uuencode works)?

Or, perhaps it is failing on the step immediately after that one...

Could someone please start up their server with -f and -q options and tell me what the server does next, ie immediately after the lines that my server dies on ??

Maybe that will help work out what the problem is.

Im not sure whether it is worth wasting time trying to fix this error or whether it would be better to use the aolserver4 CVS which i just got. It built fine, but I will need to get nspostgres or configure it to work with postgres.so which i will do tomorrow.

If the aol4server CVS is not too hard to get working with openACS maybe that will be the way to go.

Thanks for any help. Im really quiet keen to have a look at the petri-net based openACS workflow package... with a working AOLsrver!

John

4: the bleeding edge ... AOLserver4 CVS (response to 3)

Posted by John S on 03/10/03 01:47 AM

its just not worth going there yet ...

compiling the AOLserver4 CVS and adding nssha and nsxml modules successfully still gives:

./bin/nsd -f -t /home/nobody/web/vorpal/vorpal.tcl -u nobody -g web
./bin/nsd: relocation error: /usr/local/tcl/tcl8.4.2/lib/libtcl8.4.so: undefined symbol: TclCompileScript@tclByteCodeType

so it looks to me like some tcl related garbage is not being linked properly...

Shame on the AOLserver developers for requiring such a new version of tcl.

I am sick of this sort of rubbish. What is the point of making your software so bleeding edge that it doesnt even work... and people are forced to waste their valuable time compiling useless CVS filth because there is no portable, recent, stable release available ...

I wouldn't be so peeved if it wasnt for the fact that this AOLserver thing is supposed to be robust, powerful, industrial-strength etc etc.

bleagh.

What a waste of time

What is the point of this useless AOLserver piece of junk anyway? What can it *supposedly* do that Apache can't??

It can barely talk to a postgresql database by the looks of it, the ssl module requires BSAFE which appears to only be available with 30 day trial licenses, and it doesnt even work!

Currently, the damn thing accomplishes less than the following c program, which will compile and even run:

void main (void) {
//I am more useful than AOLserver4 CVS
}

8: Re: nsd aborts when restarted after apparently successful openACS installation (response to 3)

Posted by Jamie Rasmussen on 03/10/03 01:56 PM

The ns_uuencode patch in the OpenACS distribution is indeed broken, and I think it could cause the crash you are seeing. I just submitted patch #698741 at SourceForge four days ago so it definitely isn't in any version of AOLserver. You shouldn't need to apply it though, as OpenACS works around the issue in Tcl if the patch is not applied. (As opposed to an applied but broken patch.)

If you really despise Tcl, don't like patching things, or want a simple out-of-the-box solution, then the OpenACS toolkit probably isn't a good match for you. It includes over 170,000 lines of Tcl alone and has all the complexity that implies.

14: Re: nsd aborts when restarted after apparently successful openACS installation (response to 8)

Posted by John S on 03/10/03 02:46 PM

re the ns_uuencode patch, i didnt apply it because it was unclear to me exactly how to do so.

same for the -g flag.

Its not that i dont mind patching things, or want an out of the box solution, but i DO want something that will basically WORK out of the box, even if I have to customise it later to do what i want. ie it would be nice if the aolserver would actually run so i could then have a working system to work with!

With the amount of free software out there, it is a huge deterrent if something does not at least compile and install and work in some basic way out of the box... because if it doesnt, how do i know whether it is worth wasting more time on, or whether i should try something else?

if I had a working aolserver i would at least be able to experiment a bit with the openACS packages and see if i can tolerate the tcl api. but thats impossible if the aolserver doesnt work out of the box