[net.news.b] Steps to sync news between two machines.

daleske@cbdkc1.UUCP ( John Daleske x4335 3S324W RAA) (09/05/86)

Recently our machine had the occasion to lose a number of days of news.
The uucp link between cbdkc1 and cbatt had been inadvertently broken by
our system administrator.  I didn't realize it until four days later since
it happened just before a weekend.  I decided to try to get the history
files of the two machines into sync by developing a series of steps.
Ultimately these steps could likely be made intelligent enough be put into
an automatic script.

These commands were established for UNIX System V.  I realize that the BSD
folks have some commands and other commands provide similar features.  I'll
leave the development of a BSD script to someone who can actually try it.

			       -------
Assume machine A is up-link from machine B and you have a login on both.
Machine B is the one which had not received the news for a while.

uuto /usr/lib/news/history to machine A and name it Bhistory.

cp /usr/lib/news/history of machine A to Ahistory.
(At this point I pared down Ahistory because it was somewhat larger than
 my history file, having retained the history for a lot longer.)

sort -oA1 Ahistory	# With intention of using Ahistory format for 'join'
cut -f1 A1 > A2		# Pulls the Message-ID field
cut -f1 Bhistory > B1
sort -oB2 B1		# A1 A2 and B2 are now all sorted by Message-ID.

comm -23 A2 B2 > m1	# Find the difference between A2 and B2.

join A1 M1 > missing	# Using the sorted missing Message-ID fields pull
			# the complete lines from the sorted Ahistory.

cut -d" " -f5 missing > articles	# Note that "-f5" means field 5.
# My 2.10.2 version used f5.  cbatt history file had the group-message# as
# field 4.  Just check your history file 

sed -e 's+\.+/+g' articles > artfiles   # Convert article "." to file "\".

I then split this list of relative path names into reasonably small groups.
Each path name refers to one article which needs to be sent.

I ran each group through 'batch' putting the output into separate files which
I uuto'd back to the machine need the news.  Once they arrived I fed them
into 'rnews' slowly so as not to overly load the machine during the day.

___________________________________________________________________________
John Daleske  Columbus, Ohio.  614-860-4335 | Default disclaimer...
UUCP: {ihnp4,cbosgd,desoto}!cbdkc1!daleske  |
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