I've been unable to sup the current collection from sup.netbsd.org
(netbsd.warped.com).     The sup files I'm using all use
hostbase=/a/anon_ftp; that doesn't seem to be a problem.

Sup seems to fail (intermittently) on zero-length source files, e.g:

    SUP Receiving file src/bin/ed/test/q.r
    SUP: Invalid message count -1
    SUP: Error in receiving src/bin/ed/test/q.r

    SUP: Upgrade of current-src aborted at Oct 16 22:13:24 1995

and again (after restarting the client with -o):

    SUP Receiving file src/distrib/sets/lists/misc/md.i386
    SUP: Invalid message count -1
    SUP: Error in receiving src/distrib/sets/lists/misc/md.i386

    SUP: Upgrade of current-src aborted at Oct 17 00:23:46 1995
    SUP: Aborted

I've tried this on Decstations running Ultrix 4.2a, with today's
othersrc/sup compiled on Ultrix (adding -DNEED_VSNPRINTF to
the NetBSD flags, and removing the supplied time.h, which clashes
with Ultrix' time_t.)

I'e also seen the same failure using a really old sup binary -- one
that stored the  last-sup time in host byteorder, rather than
an ASCII string.  Both that binary and the latest one fail.
Certainly the ancient binary had no such problems supping from
sun-lamp.


That leaves me suspecting it's something at the server end that's
failing; but I have *no* *idea* what, if anything, it might be.

Has anyone else seem similar behaviour?