Re: [NTLK] my Newt just experienced a hiccup of the most painful variety

From: Eckhart Köppen (eck1001_at_gmx.net)
Date: Wed Dec 03 2003 - 12:05:06 PST


On Tue, 02 Dec 2003 09:56:43 -0600, Nathan Turnage wrote:
> It all started when Courier decided not to let me empty the cache,
> citing error -10606 as the reason.

It would definitely have helped to contact me first, errors from 0 to
-10xxx are quite serious. In addition to Paul's mail, my suspicion is
that your internal store got corrupted. It first showed in the -10606
error when trying to clean the Courier cache, but seems to have
affected at least the Courier preferences as well. Since the cache and
the preferences are used sometimes close together in time, this might
be quite likely. Moving things to the CF card did not really fix the
corruption of the internal store.

To make things worse, the application preferences are stored in the
System soup. If that is corrupted, more bad things happen. I'm not sure
if that would include failed backups and loss of a card store, but I
wouldn't rule it out (I lost a store once before after a reset).

The question is of course why the internal store got corrupted in the
first place. Courier and MAD Max make use of virtual binary objects
(VBOs) more or less heavily, and that feature of the NewtonOS has
caused some problems before. I'd say that there is at least some
potential for bugs or unknown behaviour with VBOs since they were added
at a late stage to the NewtonOS. I'll try to find out if there are
additional safegards possible, but it is in any case good to use
conservative settings in the Courier preferences and set a low download
and cache limit.

Eckhart

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