Author Topic: WPS - folder refresh failure...  (Read 4685 times)

Dariusz Piatkowski

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WPS - folder refresh failure...
« on: November 29, 2019, 10:48:28 pm »
I'm curious how many of you are running into a situation where the WPS itself does not appear to be showing refreshes of folders?

Let me explain a bit my situation b/c this is a bit more complicated.

My OS/2 box (4.52 SMP) has XWP installed (latest Aug_2019 1.0.13 release). What I am consistently running into is seeing my NAS hosted folders not showing new contents. For example, I have a SYSLOG deamon running on my NAS and collect LOGs from all the PCs on the network on the NAS. On my OS/2 box I have a shadow to the NAS folder where these exist, yet despite the fact that new files are being created in that folder (on the NAS) I often times do not see the matching OS/2 folder refreshes happen. Even if I invoke the 'Refresh Now' option those NEW files never appear.

The NAS is accessed through a Samba share and NetDrive mapping. Yet this is not a samba/netdrive issue (as best as i can tell so far) b/c checking the contents of the NAS folder through CLI clearly shows the NEW files. So at the Samba/netdrive interface level this appears to be fine.

My XWP has the option turned ON to replace the native WPS folder refresh process. As I attempt to track this down I will shut this OFF and monitor.

But back to my original Q: is anyone else seeing something similar to this behaviour?

Doug Clark

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Re: WPS - folder refresh failure...
« Reply #1 on: November 30, 2019, 04:21:18 pm »
Yes I have seen this - both on folders on a remote machine and folders on local drives. 

My problem was files that I knew to be in a directory were not showing up in WPS.  I have also seen where I drop a folder template on a drive object and the new folder does not appear - even after hitting refresh.

The solution (for me) was to strip off all the extended attributes of the files in the folder(s) having the issue, or the folder containing the new folder that didn't show up.  The link for that thread is: https://www.os2world.com/forum/index.php?topic=1273.0
« Last Edit: November 30, 2019, 04:51:32 pm by Doug Clark »

Dariusz Piatkowski

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Re: WPS - folder refresh failure...
« Reply #2 on: December 01, 2019, 03:00:19 pm »
Hey Doug!

Yes I have seen this - both on folders on a remote machine and folders on local drives. 

My problem was files that I knew to be in a directory were not showing up in WPS.  I have also seen where I drop a folder template on a drive object and the new folder does not appear - even after hitting refresh...

Ahh, good reminder. I had actually responded to your post back then for a slightly different reason, although it may very well be the same reason that's causing me a problem today.

I've had a re-occuring issue with XWP where WPS folders stop populating. In it's most obvious form the WHOLE folder goes blank, nothing shows up and the moment this occurs the whole WPS filesystem object structure is impacted. The only way to fix is to do a Desktop re-start, and if that hangs, well a re-boot is required.

Over the years I have tracked that down to what appears to be the very same crash in XWP. Take a look at the attached capture (all these entries show up in the xwptrap.log file), I shared with Rich Walsh previously (who I believe maintains XWP today). Unfortunately he has not been able to find the root cause.

Anyways, for now given that I suspect the two things I'm seeing here have common root cause I turned OFF XWP's folder refresh option. This means I am relying on the native WPS processing. I hate to say it but so far I haven't ran into a single occurence of either one of the issues I described above. This has only been a couple of days, so far too short of a duration to say this is IT...so more testing is needed.

Oh, btw: I'm seeing this behaviour with ALL file objects, regardless of whether they have EAs or not. In particular the NAS stuff does not have any EAs, b/c the ZyXel box Samba implementation does not support EAs.

Dariusz Piatkowski

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Re: WPS - folder refresh failure...
« Reply #3 on: December 08, 2019, 05:27:15 pm »
Well, so a week later I am happy to report that in my case shutting off XWP's Folder Refresh feature has completely addressed the issue I was seeing.

As an added benefit the occasional WPS crashes I was seeing are now also completely gone (that was the trap screen I attached to the previous post).

Anyways, I realize the XWP logic is probably fairly complex - so I'm not just outright knocking the thing - but for what its worth doing away with that feature has resulted in a more stable system here.