🚀 go-pugleaf

Not a particularly weird story, but possibly amusing...

At one point we had a PDP-11/44 as our gateway onto the net.
Everything was forwarded onto our SUNs via the old `Forward to
<so-and-so>' directive in the mail box.  Eventually, one of the SUNs
took over the gateway, and the uucp link from the PDP was disconnected
(we were (are!!!) still using the PDP occasionally).  A couple of
months later I happened to be doing something on the PDP and noticed
the system was running even slower than I remembered.  I checked the
processes running and noticed that the uu.daily crontab entry was
busy, which was somewhat odd, as it was scheduled to run at 3am, and
it was now mid afternoon.  Now amongst other things, uu.daily purges
the uucp queues of entries that are older than a certain time.  Why
should it be taking so long, I wondered?  I checked the queues; after
a number of minutes (`uusnap' normally takes just seconds), it
reported no less than HALF A MILLION jobs queued up for the SUN.

The penny dropped ... when I disconnected the uucp link, the PDP
wasn't informed - it thought there was a duff connection, and at the
moment of transition there had been one or two outstanding jobs to
forward to the SUN.  These eventually expired, and the PDP duly mailed
me to inform me that it had done so, but of course this mail was
redirected to the SUN; that's *three* uucp files for each one deleted.
So there were these new files, happily waiting to reach the SUN.  Then
they expired, were deleted, and I was informed.  Every two weeks
(since that was the expiry time), the purge program set to work,
tripling the number of waiting files...
--
   Harry Fearnhamm, ,---.'\   EMAIL: loki@moncam.uucp
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