Nethack problem
Angela Gilham
4.0. It lives in my area of the filesystem and runs fine
for me. Unfortunately, for many other people this is not
the case. The two most common problems are that when a
game is started it immediately crashes leaving a zero
size core dump in my files or somebody gets down a couple
of levels and the game crashes when they try to go down
another level with a message like:
"DISC LIMIT REACHED (/mntda/aa_az) - WRITE FAILED
Suddenly, the dungeon collapses."
Any suggestions?
Angela
E a...@aber.cs (UK) \S Ms A M Gilham \V
M a...@cs.aber.ac.uk (inet)\N Dept of Computer Science \O +44
A ...!mcsun!ukc!aber-cs-aag\A University College of Wales,\I 970 622449
I (uucp) \I Aberyswyth, Dyfed. \C
L \L SY23 3BZ. UK \E
Tom Holub
>I run a copy of nethack on a dec system running Ultrix
>4.0. It lives in my area of the filesystem and runs fine
>for me. Unfortunately, for many other people this is not
>the case. The two most common problems are that when a
>game is started it immediately crashes leaving a zero
>size core dump in my files or somebody gets down a couple
>of levels and the game crashes when they try to go down
>another level with a message like:
> "DISC LIMIT REACHED (/mntda/aa_az) - WRITE FAILED
> Suddenly, the dungeon collapses."
How does your system handle disk quotas? If your quota is more generous
than most people's, that could explain it.
I'm assuming that /mntda/aa_az is the Nethack playgound. The problem is,
Nethack gobbles disk space. Every time you go down a level, a file
called <playername>.<levelnum> is created in the playground directory.
This file contains all the monsters, treasures, etc., that are on that
level. I'm pretty sure that Nethack will try to use the uid of the
person playing, whether it's setuid or not. So, if someone near their
quota tries to play, and creating the <playername>.<levelnum> file
would push them over, your system won't let them create the file, and
Nethack dies.
If this is the problem, there's no easy way to handle it. If Nethack isn't
setuid, you could try changing it to setuid, but I don't think that'll do it.
Other than that, you could create a 'games' account with a generous
quota that people could use to play Nethack (or any other game).
Or expand everybody's quotas.
-Tom
Christian J. Callsen
Tom> In article <23...@aber-cs.UUCP> a...@cs.aber.ac.uk (Angela Gilham) writes:
Tom> If this is the problem, there's no easy way to handle it. If Nethack isn't
Tom> setuid, you could try changing it to setuid, but I don't think that'll do it.
It works with set-uid, actually. We used to run it setuid, but thanks
to our administration, we run it with setgid and some other things,
which should make it more secure.
Tom> Other than that, you could create a 'games' account with a generous
Tom> quota that people could use to play Nethack (or any other game).
Also a good idea - if you can convince the administration. If they are
reluctant, your could run games from 4pm->8am, and with low priority.
Tom> Or expand everybody's quotas.
Now, that would be nice. Or even remove quotas.
-Chris
Sean Gallaty
>4.0. It lives in my area of the filesystem and runs fine
>for me. Unfortunately, for many other people this is not
>the case. The two most common problems are that when a
I would perhaps suggest that you get the game installed properly by
the sysadmin instead of wasting file space with redundant copies?
If you want to misbehave, compile nethack to use /usr/spool/uucppublic
or /tmp as it's home dir.
I hope that your system administrator reads this newsgroup too.