Conference noetic::stars

1161.0. "STARS V2.6-5 kit and updated documentation now available" by AZTECH::ALVEY (Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a) Thu May 08 1997 05:28

    I'm pleased to announce the availability of the STARS V2.6-5 kit.
    
    This kit includes a couple of minor bug fixes along with a new
    STRS/EXTRACT/HTML function.  This new extract to html function 
    allows you the capability to extract articles from STARS databases
    using any of the current /EXTRACT selection criteria qualifiers
    into HTML files.  So, if you have been wanting to move information
    out of STARS to some other web server, this function will allow
    you to do that.
    
    Since a "template" file is used to determine the format of the HTML
    extract, it could actually be modified to do an extract into
    any ascii format.
    
    Please refer to the updated release notes and the updated DBA
    guide for more details.
    
    Since this is all that is new in this kit, it is not
    necessary to upgrade to this new version unless you need this 
    functionality.
    
    - Bryan
    
    
    Directory NOETIC::SYS$KITS:[STARS]
    
    STARSU5026.A;1          6084
    STARSU5026.B;1          3546
    STARS_DBA_GUIDE.DECW$BOOK;36
                            1612
    STARS_DBA_GUIDE.PS;36
                            2763
    STARS_DBA_GUIDE.TXT;36
                            1545
    STARS_HTTP_SERVER_GUIDE.DECW$BOOK;5
                             569
    STARS_HTTP_SERVER_GUIDE.PS;7
                             992
    STARS_HTTP_SERVER_GUIDE.TXT;5
                             597
    STARS_INSTALLATION_GUIDE.DECW$BOOK;36
                             142
    STARS_INSTALLATION_GUIDE.PS;36
                             287
    STARS_INSTALLATION_GUIDE.TXT;36
                             158
    STARS_QUERY_GUIDE.DECW$BOOK;36
                            1313
    STARS_QUERY_GUIDE.PS;36
                            3180
    STARS_QUERY_GUIDE.TXT;36
                             440
    STARS_RELEASE_NOTES.DECW$BOOK;1
                             239
    STARS_RELEASE_NOTES.PS;1
                             411
    STARS_RELEASE_NOTES.TXT;1
                             185
    
    Total of 17 files, 24063 blocks.

        We installed V2.6-5 on EIRS and began encountering the following 
        intermittent problems:

        When entering STARS from the EIRS menu, we would see the error:

                %LIB-F-BADBLOSIZ, Bad block size

        This error would repeat twice and then log the session out.

        I wrote a script to log me in and out - I was able to reproduce
        the error about 1 in 40 tries.  Fortunately I had one user who
        for some reason was able to reproduce the error fairly reliably.

        Occasionally, all we would see is one or more databases not
        opening - these gave a %STARS-W-DBERROR - the other databases
        would be available. It was unpredictable - the database not 
        opening would vary. At different times the reluctant database was
        CNS, VES, APPL_TOOLS, etc...

        Other problems we saw was one the last 2 evenings the GERBIL
        process had 3 failures to update. To underscore the
        intermittency, this means 70 successes and 3 failures.
        On each of the failures I was able to update the info manually.
        The logs for the procedure looked like this:

$ strs/format/audit/data=stars$:[ORACLE_NOTES]/env=nodata/owner=GERBIL -
  /site=eirs/geo=usa  SQL_SERVICES.fef
%STARS-I-IDENT, STARS V2.6-5 - Batch Mode Processing
Copyright (c) Digital Equipment Corporation. 1988,1996. All Rights
Reserved.

%STARS-I-INIT, Activating database(s)...
%STARS-W-DBERROR, Problem opening database STARS$:[ORACLE_NOTES]
%STARS-F-NODBOPEN, There are no currently active databases

        I fell back to V2.6-4 and the problem has disappeared.
        
                                                Thanks,
                                                          John Kidwell