mark@cbosgd.UUCP (05/29/84)
If you've been seeing some strange behaviour out of readnews lately in net.unix-wizards and net.micro, here's why. There is a bitmap kept in readnews of what articles in the current newsgroup you have read. The bitmap is 1024 bytes, room enough for 8192 bits. I remember 3 years ago discussing this with Matt Glickman, and we both thought that 8192 was forever, and that sites would reset their article numbers long before then. Well, if your host has been on Usenet for a long time, chances are you have received over 8192 articles in net.unix-wizards and are nearing 8192 in net.micro. When you pass this magic number, the typical symptom is that the articles won't go away, they keep reappearing. Of course, other things might happen, depending on your hardware and version of UNIX, it might dump core, refuse to show you anything more, etc. There are two solutions. One is to reset your article count. This is ugly but not really very hard - you edit /usr/lib/news/active changing the count on the newsgroups to 00000. Then either edit everybody's .newsrc to delete the lines for those newsgroups, or post a message to "general" telling your users to do so. This can cause various bad things to happen - people will not understand your directions, they will miss some news, etc. It's up to you to decide whether this is a problem. The other solution is to raise the limit. There are two places in the code to change: rextern.c: bitmap[1024] change to 2048 rfuncs.c: next = 8193; change to 16385 The penalty for raising the bound isn't very great - readnews will be 1K bigger. However, there will be an increased search time to do things like clear out the array, hunt for unread articles, etc. You could make it even bigger if you like, I am not sure if any short variables will cause troubles with article numbers over 32767 on 32 bit machines, but it will almost certainly cause trouble to go higher than that on a 16 bit machine. Mark