romain@salt.pyramid.com (Romain Kang) (02/16/91)
[news.software.b added to Newsgroups: because of possible general interest.] In <1991Feb15.050851.7759@moon.nbn.com> jh@moon.nbn.com (John Harkin) writes: | I've just been hit by thousands of articles older than my history file | for the second time in two weeks. I was set for 10 day expire and 14 | day retention of expired lines in history. I just changed that to 30 | day retention. Is there anything else I can do to protect my system | from old duplicates? How long do other sites hold on to expired | history lines? Assuming you have B news, you may want to change HISTEXP in defs.h and rebuild inews/rnews. (HISTEXP defaults to 4 weeks; anything older is considered too old and is junked immediately). Then clean out junk every night. Alternatively, you can raise your history retention to match HISTEXP, though watch the file system that holds your history file if you do. Retaining history longer than HISTEXP probably doesn't gain you much. The protection from these measures, though, is not adequate if broken software sends out old news with transmogrified Message-Ids (e.g., the classic notes meltdown or a Fido barf). You need to be on your toes all the time, or get a 2GB disk...