mark@cbosgd.ATT.COM (Mark Horton) (10/13/86)
I just got mail from a news adm who had planned on doing the rmgroups all at once. He got burned because his active file overflowed. There was no warning message, so all his news fell on the floor silently. There are two limits in the active file: AFSIZ limits the number of bytes in the active file, and LINES limits the number of newsgroups. You're likely to overflow AFSIZ first, and you could easily be reaching it soon. One of the reasons we're doing the newgroups and rmgroups gradually is so we won't have a double sized active file. If you do rmgroups manually and don't do them as they come in, you'll almost certainly overflow. The rmgroups for talk groups have already gone out. soc rmgroups go out next month. sci and misc will go out in December. And so on. This is a good time to clean out your active file, while you're at it. Erik Fair sent around a hundred or so rmgroups for old dead names that he found in .newsrc files on ucbvax. If you got mail from your system about them, you still have them in your active file. If you don't have the rmgroup shell script, the critical resource is the /usr/lib/news/active file itself, you can manually edit the lines out. You might as well remove the directories under /usr/spool/news, too, but this won't bother news. It might not be a bad idea to increase AFSIZ in defs.h to 20000, if you're worried about your active file overflowing. It will certainly get bigger before it gets smaller. comp and rec are large classes, and next month's we'll probably newgroup the rec groups and rmgroup the old soc groups (soc and talk have relatively few groups.) For anyone whose active file just overflowed, you might not see this message. If you hear of a problem with your neighbor, you might want to pass this message along, in case it's the problem. Mark Horton
larry@jc3b21.UUCP (Lawrence F. Strickland) (10/16/86)
In article <2748@cbosgd.ATT.COM>, mark@cbosgd.ATT.COM (Mark Horton) writes: > I just got mail from a news adm who had planned on doing the rmgroups > all at once. He got burned because his active file overflowed. > There was no warning message, so all his news fell on the floor silently. > ... > This is a good time to clean out your active file, while you're at it. > Erik Fair sent around a hundred or so rmgroups for old dead names that > he found in .newsrc files on ucbvax. If you got mail from your system > about them, you still have them in your active file. > ... > Mark Horton For those of us who live on the edge of known universe (FL), is there any way to find out what groups have already been rm'd? I'm not having problems with disk space (or at least no more than normal), but the new groups + old groups are eating up my inodes like crazy! I would like to remove the old, no longer used groups, but have only received about 6 rmgroup messages (net.religion, etc.). If I can find out what else is gone, it would really help! Thanks, -----Larry -----Lawrence F. Strickland (larry@jc3b21) --------------------------- Dept. of Engineering Technology + Cthulhu + St. Petersburg Jr. College + R`lyeh + P.O. Box 13489 + wgah`nagl + St. Petersburg, FL 33733 + fh`tagn + Phone: +1 813 341 4705 --------------------------- UUCP: ...akgua!usfvax2!jc3b21!larry