Don't get too excited yet!

When you reply to an entry in ELOG, then some additional data is added to that original entry. 

So, if you reply today (say 02/06/11) to an entry made yesterday, then you will find that the file 110602a.log has a large change (the new entry in full, plus elog extra codes), *and* an additional line added into 110601a.log.  Deleting 110602a.log will not remove the line in 110601a.log, and that could still cause problems, that is, wandering into an infinite loop.

To save a lot of effort, I'll suggest that you (a) keep the back-ups up to date, and keep two (the latest and the one before that); (b) proceed carefully at least to start with.  If you fall into the infinite loop again, then flag it up and I (or someone else) will be able to give further pointers.

David Pilgram.

So unless you are sure that

 It would be nice to have this corrected. The problem occurs when you select (read) a message which refers to another message via "In-reply-to", and this message does not exist.

Soren

Soren, you're not alone!  I've had similar problems, as did Sara Vanini (elog:67077).

In my case, it is because the "move" or "copy" function does not move all the messages in very long threads.   To be more precise, elog will crash in the attempt to move a long thread - say over 40 replies, I don't know for sure.  Sometimes it has already moved the entire thread before it crashes, sometimes not.  I'd not flagged it up as an issue because I could not be sure it was not a memory issue with the old (>12 years) linux box I was using earlier this year, but it still happens on this new (to me, only 3 years old) linux box.

Whether it is the number of entries, the total memory size of the thread or some combination, I don't know.

I've found that in the "move" case, it has not deleted all the messages from the donor thread, so that there is a semi-thread still hidden there.  Should one by chance select that semi-thread, (because it is found during a search) elog goes into infinate loop, which requires a reboot of this linux box to fix.   Certainly the pinning down the issue to the missing entry referenced by an <i>In reply to:</i> explains this part of the issue.  Of course, deletion of one entry within a thread, or other adjustments will do the same thing, just as you (Soren) point out above.

If it happens to me, I will go in to the yymmdda.log files and fix the problem, be it deleting the entries of the semi-thread, moving across missing entries from the donor to the acceptor logbooks, adjusting the <i>Reply:</i> and <i>In reply to:</i> lines, but that is quite a time consuming and error prone exercise.

Hello,

We've been using ELOG 2.6.5 to 2.7.8 for 4 years without any major problems.

Recently we upgraded to version 2.9.0 and since we've had the daemon frequently crash with SEGV.

I've detached debugging output from one time when ELOG the crashed. We've had many crashes
it was a different logbook each time. Platform is Solaris 10 5/08 on SPARC.

Has anyone else experienced problems with 2.9.0?

Best Regards

Kester

Some user wanted to modify the URL by hand and succeeded to crash the elogd process with npp=now
It appears that npp=0 crashes elogd with the following error message:

Program received signal SIGFPE, Arithmetic exception.
0x0808eba2 in show_elog_list (lbs=0xab3c770, past_n=0, last_n=0, page_n=1,
    default_page=1, info=0x0) at src/elogd.c:20214
20214            sprintf(str + strlen(str), loc("Page %d of %d"), page_n, (n_msg - 1) / n_page + 1);

I guess this bug is not OS dependent: you can crash every logbook that you can search ;-)

I have two identical servers (IBM X337) setup on the same LAN with Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS with ELOGD running (Compiled from tarbell) with the same exact package install base. (Only difference between the two servers is the hostname, and the ELOGD.CFG global section)