[foxboro] Persistant files in /tmp

You may remember the issues we have been experiencing with alarm manager on
PC's hosted off a WP. Well yesterday, with help from the guru's in Foxwatch
we found (at least part) of the problem. We had determined that the problem
was related to the "alarms" pick on the top menu not restarting the needed
am task, when it had been shut down (for instance by clicking on the X in
the window manager decoration, or File -> Dismiss).

So, we ran truss on the dm instance, and clicked on the pick. The Bill
Bennett (sp) from Foxwatch dug through the resultant data file and found
that dm was trying to open a file in /tmp that did not exist.

We have a disk cleanup shell script that runs on our *NOX machines to
prevent disks filling up. We had sometime in the past run into an issue
with some persistent file that Foxboro creates in /var/tmop, and never
modifies after boot, so it was being removed, and this was causing an
issue.

The files we ran into yesterday are of the form /tmp/_a* and /tmp/_d*. Now
what's interesting is that when I look at the AW on this node, which has a
dedicated display manager, and hosts remote DM for view only, I see files
of the format /tmp/_dm* and /tmp/DM*. It's probable that the cleanup task
has already removed the /tmp/am* files, but since no one quits the am on
his station, this has not been a problem (I guess?). But interesting
enough the /tmp/dm* files on the have times tamps that are pretty much the
current time. This is _not_ true on the wp's. 

Does anyone have any insight on these files, and why I see differences in
the times tamps?

And the moral of this story is don't assume "normal" programing practices
from Foxboro. Good programing practice would suggest that persistent files
that need to exist for the life of a long running process, and don't get
modified on a frequent basis _not_ be put in a temporary directory
location!


-- 
U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote - Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong 
Terror 
- New York Times 9/3/1967
 
 
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