Hi All;
This is so weird you might think I'm making it up, but I've got proof -
I told Glenn of my intentions BEFORE this happened.
If you ever needed a little push to get you to install Arachne on a ramdisk,
here it comes:
I had decided I might have time to upgrade my Arachne from super-stable 1.62
to something newer *IF* I could find something as stable. I was hoping to use
1.67, because the FTP works right and it displays my own pages properly,
neither of which can be said for 1.66. A1.70 has too many problems and the
other two just don't LOOK right.
After a bit of research, I learned that 1.67 eats memory, but I decided to
try it to see what it felt like.
After a very short stint on Arachne chat, it crashed - no big deal.
To finish off my night I did a mailrun with A1.62 - which normally results in
hangup - read some mail, and hit ESC to go to the index. It gets a bit fuzzy
here, because I don't know why I hit ESC again, but Arachne apparantly wanted
to do the mailrun again. (I hate that). Since I wasn't online, I got an error
screen. Here I *KNOW* what I did. I hit ESC to get out of the error screen.
That's the "back" button for me.
Arachne 1.62 went into a loop, trying to get mail, error screen, maybe even
inbox, about 1 - 2 sec around the loop. Nothing would stop it. I tried ESC,
altX, altE - and pushed the reset button.
Restarted Arachne, expecting the "LOCK" screen, and instead got a different
screen - "Unable to Load the Requested URL".
Exited and did the usual deletes.
Tried again. Same thing. SHE COULDN'T FIND PPP_INIT.HTM.
Exited.
Chkdsk: 103 lost clusters.
Converted to files: 1.7Mbytes.
Ran NDD: Invalid directory entries in C:\ARACHNE.
Viewed all the FILEnnnn.chk: DOZENS of copies of Arachne.cfg.
A LOT of copies of Mime.cfg. Lots of HTM files glued together.
HALF of PPP_INIT.HTM. Bits of ZIPs.
*FILES FROM NON-ARACHNE DIRECTORIES* mixed with pieces of Arachne files.
Ran A1.66 to look at the contents of \MAIL and found 255 pieces of mail
had disappeared from the more recent end. That's about 500k - so there
was still 1.2Megs unaccounted for.
Most of it appears to have been dislocated from C:\Arachne main and download.
Most importantly, the zipped collection of all my changes to A1.62 was gone !!
And most frighteningly, files from my "TEXT" directory were gone !
Who knows where and what else may have been compromised.
I believe that LD was the last to report a major debacle, and I seem to
remember that she didn't get much sympathy. I doubt she was looking for
sympathy, and I'm certainly not.
I'm trying to get across the idea that Arachne can reach out of her prescribed
space and perform unnatural acts with your files. The bigger your HD, the more
risk you take. Don't think that your separate partition will protect you.
In one case, 1.65 I believe, she reached into another drive to wipe my NS
bookmarks.
That was easy to fix. LD's main directory delete was easy to fix. (I think)
This one makes my whole drive suspect. :(
I'll see tonight if it can be salvaged, and if I can recover some of the
changes I made to A1.62 before I wipe the directory and re-install.
Maybe the "stable" versions just save it all up for one big hit. <g>
- Clarence Verge
--
- Help stamp out FATWARE. As a start visit: http://home.arachne.cz/
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