Interesting error...

[Christopher.Short at abare.gov.au]

Lawrence,

My apologies - in my haste I see I wrote a message leaving everyone with the impression that I was uncontrollably stuck in a loop - I knew I could recover from backups and eventually resorted to that around the time I sent the message.

The short answer is that although the crashing behavior is repeatable, I have solved the problem by rescheduling the task within my script. The long answer is as follows.

I am interested in the nature of the error. I never had it previously, but I then remembered I had seen it once or twice before, about 6 weels ago when I renewed our lapsed licence.

In my hurry to solve all the 'problems' of a fresh install at the time (ie recreate the stable system with all the personalised features I had prior to the clean Frontier install) I had turned off my overnight restart routine and set it to restart this morning.

But I can confirm that the behavior is repeatable where previously there was no problem.

What I think was happening is possibly because of the interesting interpretation of user.scheduler.prefs.reschedule within scheduler.monitor() 

Currently I have 

user.scheduler.prefs.reschedule = true
user.scheduler.prefs.confirmStartupTasks = false

If user.scheduler.prefs.reschedule is true, but user.scheduler.prefs.confirmStartupTasks is false AND minutesBetweenRuns is greater than 60, then the task is run upon startup, rather than being rescheduled.

So what was happening was that, the restart scheduled task was being called upon startup rather than being rescheduled, so Frontier was shutting down, then being relauched and then the restart scheduled task was being called etc etc.

Still doesn't explain why the error of unable to read a memory block is occurring.

Going back to backups prior to the fresh install I have:

user.scheduler.prefs.reschedule = false
user.scheduler.prefs.confirmStartupTasks = true

Which, looking at the logic of scheduler.monitor rescheduled the task despite the above preferences (and explains why the ctRuns value was over 2000 for my taks - the task was always rescheduled on startup).

It appears I was previously caught in the happy world of daily tasks that were rescheduled despite the preference setting but because of the logic of the monitor script (and I was never asked to confirm on startup previously - so I never noticed).

So the problem has been solved by updating the time for the next running of the task within the script rather than relying on scheduler.monitor to reschedule it:

For those that are still interested - here is the automatic shutdown script:

if system.environment.isWindows { //make sure the flaunch app is running
	if not sys.appisrunning ("flaunch.exe") {
		local (frontierPath = Frontier.getProgramPath ());
		local (frontierFolder = file.folderFromPath (frontierPath));
		local (flaunchPath = frontierFolder + "Extras\\keepFrontierRunning\\windows\\flaunch.exe");
		launch.appWithDocument (flaunchPath, frontierPath)}};

if Frontier.countThreads () <= 4 {
	user.scheduler.tasks.restarter.tasktime = user.scheduler.tasks.restarter.tasktime + (60*60*24);
	filemenu.save ();
	tcp.sendmail (user.prefs.mailAddress, "Frontier restart at" + clock.now());
	filemenu.quit ()}

Cheers,
Christopher





-----Original Message-----
From: Lawrence Lee [mailto:lawrence at userland.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, 1 February 2005 10:51 AM
To: Frontier-Users at userland.com
Subject: RE: Interesting error...

If you swap in a backup of Frontier.root (rename your existing one) do you still get the error message?

You might be able to set user.scheduler.prefs.runThreads in frontierStartupCommands to see if that lets you startup Frontier and possibly jettison that bad object.

http://frontier.userland.com/reference/environment/frontierStartupCommandsTx
t

http://frontier.userland.com/reference/environment/runtime/schedulerThreads

Lawrence Lee
UserLand Software
www.userland.com
 

---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
IMPORTANT - This message has been issued by The Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF).  The information transmitted is for the use of the intended recipient only and may contain confidential and/or legally privileged material.  It is your responsibility to check any attachments for viruses and defects before opening or sending them on.  
Any reproduction, publication, communication, re-transmission, disclosure, dissemination or other use of the information contained in this e-mail by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited.  The taking of any action in reliance upon this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited.  If you have received this e-mail in error please notify the sender and delete all copies of this transmission together with any attachments.  If you have received this e-mail as part of a valid mailing list and no longer want to receive a message such as this one advise the sender by return e-mail accordingly.  Only e-mail correspondence which includes this footer, has been authorised by DAFF 
----------------------------------------------------------------------