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Date:      Sat, 6 Mar 1999 18:51:15 -0500 (EST)
From:      Bill Paul <wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu>
To:        toasty@home.dragondata.com (Kevin Day)
Cc:        freebsd-bugs@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: bin/6234
Message-ID:  <199903062351.SAA09969@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu>
In-Reply-To: <199903062259.QAA13812@home.dragondata.com> from "Kevin Day" at Mar 6, 99 04:58:59 pm

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Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Kevin Day had 
to walk into mine and say:

> > Synopsis: ypserv -d is broken
> > 
> > State-Changed-From-To: open-closed
> > State-Changed-By: wpaul
> > State-Changed-When: Sat Mar 6 11:41:17 PST 1999
> > State-Changed-Why: 
> > 
> > This PR basically says "it doesn't work" and fails to provide enough
> > details to diagnose the problem or reproduce it. The debug mode of
> > ypserv does indeed work; I've used it plenty of times and so have
> > others. I don't doubt that ypserv -d failed for this person for some
> > reason, however it was undoubtedly due to some other factor which
> > is impossible to trace without more information or experimentation
> > by the user.
> > 
> > Also, the PR is for FreeBSD 2.2.5, which is quite old.
> > 
> > -Bill
> > 
> 
> To follow up, this still happens in 3.1-RELEASE.
>
> 
> Specificing 'ypserv -d' makes ypserv completely unresponsive, and never
> outputs any debugging... What more info do you want? :)

How about "a lot."

I want to know _PRECISELY_ the steps you took to arrive at this
conclusion. Now, people never seem to understand just what I mean
when I ask this. I don't just want hear "Well, I type ypserv -d, and
it doesn't work." There are other important things besides this
which can affect the result. I'm not there watching you, so you have
to be very clear and detailed and _complete_ in your description
of the problem. I don't want to have to go ten rounds of e-mail
that starts with "ypserv -d doesn't work" before I get to "oh,
yes, I did unplug the ethernet cable from the machine just before
I tried to run ypserv -d; you mean that matters?"

For example, when you run ypserv -d, are you being careful to
kill any existing ypserv already running on the system? Are you
aware of the fact that ypserv only prints debug messages when
a client tries to bind to it and starts interacting with it? If
a client is bound to an instance of ypserv and you kill ypserv
to start a new instance, the client takes time before it times
out the binding to the old instance and starts broadcasting to
establish a new binding. It's only when that happens that the
new ypserv in debug mode will start to produce output. But you
didn't say how long you waited for ypserv to produce any output,
you didn't say how long you waited for clients to connect or if
you even tried to force any clients to rebind by killing and re-
syarting ypbind (or using ypset). All you said is "it doesn't
work."

What you could also do is investigate farther. It's very easy
to compile ypserv with -g and then run gdb on it. If you think
it's not really doing anything, gdb will prove or disprove your
suspicions beyond any doubt.

-Bill

-- 
=============================================================================
-Bill Paul            (212) 854-6020 | System Manager, Master of Unix-Fu
Work:         wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu | Center for Telecommunications Research
Home:  wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu | Columbia University, New York City
=============================================================================
 "It is not I who am crazy; it is I who am mad!" - Ren Hoek, "Space Madness"
=============================================================================


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