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I own an Urbit planet, but I haven't used it to communicate with anyone in several months. The reason is simple: my ship has been unable to receive messages from anyone since mid-July, and I have no idea why. I can `|hi` other ships and can access Landscape without issues, but when I open a group the Groups app, dojo prints a dump of nouns, with the core of the problem being a bad peek operation.
I've run into the same issue twice before, and in the other two instances I breached my ship and deleted my pier to try to fix the problem. These were two of no less than seven breaches I've performed to solve one problem or another. I'm getting tired of having to pay an Ethereum gas fee every time my ship starts throwing errors, so I've largely abandoned my planet over the last four months.
Today I decided to finally make a serious attempt to solve the problem. Several people have created issues on GitHub with similar error messages, but the tickets were always either closed without a posted resolution or fixed by an OTA update. I know I've had issues updating in the past, so I started today by running an update from a new OTA source, specifically ~zod:
|ota ~zod %kids
Running `+trouble` after this command showed me that %base had an update pending for zuse 412, but the update simply stalled. Landscape was a little more informative about why: several desks were blocking the update, because they too needed to be upgraded to support zuse 412. I used
|suspend [%desk]
with the output of `+trouble` to suspend every desk except %base, and as soon as I did that, the update to %base completed successfully. I then re-enabled each desk with `|revive [%desk]` one at a time, allowing each to update as it came back online. Some apps don't have support for zuse 412; I ended up uninstalling those apps entirely.
Unfortunately, this work didn't solve the problem. I still get bad peeks from ames on /x/all and /news, and I still can't figure out why. I can see other errors relating to my star when I run `|ames-verb %odd` as well, but I'm not sure they're related.
I've decided to leave my planet running overnight and seeing what happens to it. Many people have reported that bad ames packets eventually cause their ships to crash, so I'll see if the same thing happens here. That might be a clue as to where to start. Otherwise, it might be necessary to do a deep dive into ames an try to understand what these bad peeks really mean.`
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[Last updated: 2024-04-24]