[Zope] A tip about 2GB Data.fs issues

[Paul Winkler]

Running zope 2.5.1 with python 2.1.3, Data.fs was getting big
so I needed to recompile python with large file support.

Found some directions somewhere with C compiler flags, 
rebuilt python, installed it,  opened a python
prompt and tried first opening and then creaging
some big files (like 2.5 GB) and everything works.
So I'm good to go -- right?

Wrong. And I hope I can prevent someone from making the
same mistake.

Today my Data.fs grew over 2 GB for the first time
and I noticed that writes were failing.
Restarted ZEO and it failed - corrupt database!!! ugh.

To make a long story short, I discovered taht
*some* file operations (open, write) work fine
but some (truncate, probably others) do not. 
What the hell?

Well, I discovered the Lib/test/test_largefile.py
script in the python source and it was failing.
telling me i didn't have largefile support. wierd.

so I looked up the largefile support instructions again
(in python docs for teh posix module) and did it again-
but this time I did "make clean".  Which I think I forgot
before. Whoops.  

Now everything works.  I managed to get zope back up
after truncating the file at 2 GB exactly (where the
corruption started).

So watch out when building python for largefile support
... make clean! make clean!


--

Paul Winkler
"Welcome to Muppet Labs, where the future is made - today!"