


    well... there is always a first time for everything... so it was my 
    turn to learn and feel what is about a message base being corrupted. 
    but let's see the details, in hope that it may help you in the future, 
    in case you notice the same behavior in your bbs. 
    
    in my area, power outages and fluctuations is a "normal" thing. we 
    have lot of both of them. so my bbs machine (a rpi3b) had and has many 
    abnormal shutdowns. but even so, i have never noticed any weird 
    behavior, until now. the thing was, that in the same time, i 
    subscribed to a new echonet, so i did make some changes to the bbs, 
    that also affected mutil and fidopoll.
    
    the weird behavior, was that mutil was crashing... a lot! after each 
    mutil crash, fidopoll got stacked, because of remaining semaphore files 
    and never polled packets after that. another very weird thing was, 
    that just once, i got msgs from one msg. base to another one. i 
    imagined that the msg.base that got the msgs was corrupted and because 
    it didn't had many messages i deleted it. i also checked the 
    mystic.dat file and the msg.base ids for corruption, but everything 
    was fine. for a few days, i was noticing the same pattern behavior. 
    fidopoll gets traffic, mutil process them, got stacked and fidopoll 
    stacked also after that.
    
    the error logs, didn't show something usefull except some general 
    messages like "memory corruption" and "runtime error"... and because 
    at first i thought that the error was in fidopoll, i lost some time 
    with it. and then... "eureka"! just by accident i found where the 
    problem was.
    
    after getting frustrated, i executed a maintenance script in mutil and 
    suddenly it crashed! repeated the process again and also crashed. both 
    time while checking the message bases, but i couldn't figure which one 
    and because i thought that i had fixed the problem by deleting the one 
    i talked about in the begining, i never got suspicious that i 
    deleted/cleared the wrong one. so... back to the message base editor 
    and checked settings for the message bases. by luck, i noticed that in 
    a specific msg. base, i had put a limit of messages to keep. the limit 
    was 10.000msg, but i remembered that while browsing the msg.bases that 
    base had 13000+. everything else was just fine. so i deleted the files 
    of that msg.base and... voila! everything was fine. i restored the 
    base from an older backup and also everything was fine.
    
    my guess, is that something went wrong in the header of that msg.base 
    or the header of a msg. and things went out of hand and caused all the 
    "burps" in the mutil utility. nothing serious, but man what a 
    bummer... specially if you are making the wrong guesses and not 
    finding the root of the problem.
    
    so... lesson learned... never assume anything... and just follow the 
    lead, the breadcrumbs... all the evidences were there, but i kept 
    making guesses my self instead of reading the facts. as a final 
    solution i could restore an older backup and everything would be fixed 
    instantly... but it's more fun hitting your head at the wall and try to 
    fix things :)
    
    
    
    


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