From: jasper@vax.path.ox.ac.uk
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.gopher
Subject: Re: Why does VAX/VMS Gopher client hang?  Any patches?
Date: 12 Oct 92 17:02:13 GMT
Organization: Oxford University Molecular Biology Data Centre
Nntp-Posting-User: rpgrant

In article <kjcole.718661481@well.sf.ca.us>, kjcole@well.sf.ca.us (Kevin Cole) writes:
> 
> From: CADS_COLE@GALLUA.BITNET (Kevin Cole; Washington DC)
> Organization: Gallaudet Research Institute
> Lines: 28
> 
> Hi.
> 
> About a week ago, I downloaded, edited and compiled the VMS Gopher client from 
> boombox.  I later got the version from ohio state.  Both seemed to work fine, 
> but yesterday, I got a message from our Computer Services Dept. telling me that 
> there was a runaway process that ate up 16 hours of CPU time, running my image 
> of Gopher.  Needless to say, this did nothing to improve my already tarnished 
> reputation.
> 
> The user who had the problem pretty savvy when it comes to technology.  She
> told me she tried the usual ctrl-C & ctrl-Y to abort the thing when it never
> came back, but she said it didn't get her anywhere.  So she just walked away
> from it.  I believe she was doing a search at the time.  This morning, another
> user (less sophisticated) told me that she got frozen out while just trying to 
> get a directory.

I think this is the WAIS problem. John Reece (jreece@sousa.intel.com) posted
this previously and it seems to have fixed this problem for me. 

It looks as though the effect is independent of tcp/ip implementation:

I haven't seen any problems since patching this way.

> I'm very new to the wonderful world of Gophers, and so I don't necessarily know 
> what I'm doing, but do other VAX/VMS GOPHER users have the same problems?  Or 
> is there a patch out there?

This is the info, I'll leave you to patch the code rather than reposting it. 

regards,    jasper


Jasper Rees
Oxford University Molecular Biology Data Centre
Sir William Dunn School of Pathology

jasper@vax.path.ox.ac.uk

John's Patch:

Newsgroups: alt.gopher
Subject: VMS client -> WAIS problem & fix
From: jreece@sousa.intel.com (John Reece)
Date: 31 Jul 92 23:04:03 GMT
Reply-To: jreece@sousa.intel.com
Organization: Intel - Information Technologies


After getting the VMS client I found that although I was able to retrieve
ordinary files in the Gopher tree it went into an endless loop once I tried
to do a keyword search of a WAIS database.  Based on comparisons with the
Unix client there seem to be three things amiss with the VMS/Multinet 
implementation that prevented it from reading WAIS databases:

   1>	At line 7 in GOPHERSTRUCT.H g_struct->sPath is defined too small
        to hold a complete WAIS path spec.  I increased its size from
        256 to 512.

   2>	In feed_a_gopher() in GOPHER.C several data element sizes 
	differed from the corresponding code in the Unix client.  In
        lines 82 and 85 I changed foo[255] to foo[1024].  In the
        readfield() calls at lines 113, 116, and 119 I changed the
        lengths from to 1024

   3>   In Load_Index_or_Dir() in GOPHER.C the lines at 1030-1031 
        which pass the pathname along with the search string to the
        server were commented out.  I uncommented them.

In cursory testing I was able to do a keyword search to retrieve WAIS text 
records from a dash-type database. I was still able to retrieve the ordinary 
files in the Gopher tree.  However, I haven't set up the Archie or FTP
gateway, so I don't know how these changes affect that functionality.
Also, I haven't really analyzed the data structure size changes to see 
if they're consistent.  The modified code follows.