CVS History Size Limit

When I came to work this morning some colleagues complained about the CVS server not working properly. I tried myself and got a

Terminated with signal 25

error, no matter what I did. I could neither check out files nor commit modifications or new files.

Update: raghukumar.c _@_ tavant.com seems to have got a slightly different message (CVS Terminated with fatal signal 25) which I include here to improve search engine hits.

I had a look at the server and could not find anything, neither in the logs nor the usual suspects like exceeded quotas, full partitions or permissions. I suspected some sort of automatic update by RedHat's up2date, but that was not the case, either.

It took me a while until the CVSROOT/history file' size in the repository in question caught my eye with a size of precisely 2GB. Searching the net did not give me any hints about a limitation of that file's size, but apparently it is there. I could easily resolve the issue though, because I saw that when setting up the server months ago I had accidentally forgotten to reduce the LogHistory setting in CVSROOT/config. It had tracked each and every checkout, local delete, merges, conflicts etc.

With a little help from grep I managed to reduce the file size from 2GB to about 50MB. I just ran the following on the server's shell after I had disabled the CVS access by stopping xinetd:

egrep -v "^[TMAR].*$" > history.new

mv history history.full

mv history.new history

I kept the original file just for sure. After restarting xinetd people could not check in files, because there were some stale locks left. So I had to do a

find /var/lock/cvs -iname #cvs.rfl* -exec rm {} \;

to get rid of those. After that all problems vanished.

I think I will still file a bug report, because even though we are very unlikely to hit the limit again considering the growth rate, but maybe someone depends on a finer logging. At least it should be documented.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SAXParseException: -1:-1: Premature End Of File - Misleading error

Today I had to look at a piece of code a colleague had written, using my XPathAccessor class. She used it in a servlet which gets XML formatted requests. As those are generated by an external 3rd party tool we agreed on some XML schema definitions. Everything they send us needs to conform to its corresponding schema, each reply we send gets validated against a different set.In order to allow independent testing on either side, we provided a little test kit that allows testing our system without having to set up a servlet engine. Basically it just takes a file, reads it into a String and hands that to the handler.First it gets parsed without validation. This is necessary to find out which type of request we were send (the address is the same for all of them). After the root element is known, it will be read again, this time using the right schema to verify the request.Once that is done, some reply is put together and sent back to the client. So far, so good.When I looked at the code I …
Read more

Amiga 500 Restoration: A501 Memory Expansion

Image
The previous posts were mostly about cosmetics. This one is more technical, dealing with the repair and some preventative maintenance of the A501 memory expansion card. If you are curious to learn more about the retrobrighting of the computer’s case, don’t worry — I’ll get back to that at a later time.This is the third post in a series about restoring an Amiga 500 back to its former glory. Here are all of them so far. I’ll try to remember to update this in all related entry.2017-12-24: Amiga 500 Restoration2018-01-05: Retrobrighting I2018-02-05: A501 Memory ExpansionAmiga Memory — The BasicsWhen the Amiga 500 was first introduced, it came with 512KB of memory. That was already double the amount the original Amiga 1000 had, but still not a whole lot. Especially when developers started to get familiar with the audio and video capabilities of the machine, RAM became a limiting factor in what you could do. Merely copying a single floppy disk with its 880KB required swapping back and forth…
Read more

Can't start server: Bind on TCP/IP port: No such file or directory

(Also see the follow-up post about some progress)Today I was (again) facing a log file from a machine that had for some reason not been able to start a temporary MySQL daemon during the night to prepare for a streaming MySQL slave installation. The necessary 2nd daemon had created its new ibdata files, however just after that aborted the startup process with the following message:Can't start server: Bind on TCP/IP port: No such file or directory 071001 23:09:55 [ERROR] Do you already have another mysqld server running on port: 3310 ? 071001 23:09:55 [ERROR] Aborting 071001 23:09:55 [Note] mysql\bin\mysqld.exe: Shutdown completeAs you can see, the port is a different one from the default MySQL port, so I can be sure there was no conflict with the primary instance. Even more curiously the same process has been working on that and other machines flawlessly for some time. However I remember having seen this message once before, but back then I did not have the time to look into it any…
Read more