mark@cbosgd.ATT.COM (Mark Horton) (10/29/86)
In the first few days of November, as part of the Usenet reorganization, the new newsgroups in the comp and news classes will be created. A few weeks after that the old names for soc, comp, and news will be rmgrouped and then rec will be created. Since there are 62 comp newsgroups, 9 news newsgroups, and 65 rec newsgroups, this will make the active file much longer. It is possible (and indeed likely) that your active file will overflow if you haven't been keeping up with the rmgroups sent around. If your active file overflows, the symptom will be that all incoming news will be thrown away, and the log file /usr/lib/news/log will get error messages about how the ACTIVE file is too long. If an administrator sees this problem (you should check for it after you get the mail about the newgroups) you need to clean out your active file (/usr/lib/news/active.) If a user sees the problem, you should contact your netnews administrator and get them to fix it. Here is a count of newsgroups on cbatt (after the *.misc were created just now.) If you have many more than this, you should clean out your active file. ("to x" says how many there will be when we're done.) There is a checkgroups message in net.news.adm which should be a big help in figuring out what's old and what's current. 181 net (to 0) 65 mod 1 comp (to 62) 1 news (to 9) 14 sci 12 misc 1 rec (to 65) 13 soc 8 talk 1 na If you're a system administraor trying to figure out what to do (possibly after the active file has overflowed) here is some guidance. First, clean out your active file. Anything that's old, you should run rmgroup on, for example: /usr/lib/news/rmgroup net.politics /usr/lib/news/rmgroup net.abortion /usr/lib/news/rmgroup net.sources.lock-up (etc) If you don't have the rmgroup script, you can get the same effect by editing /usr/lib/news/active and deleting the lines. You should rmdir the directory under /usr/spool/news too. Another thing you can do is upgrade to 2.11; it is being posted to mod.sources over the next few days. You still need to keep the active file down, but I understand it's not as critical. We recommend upgrading to 2.11 anyway, it will make life much easier for your users posting to moderated groups, for example, and you won't have to maintain /usr/lib/news/moderators any more. If this isn't enough, you don't want to delete the new newsgroups. Instead, you should delete old groups. Start by deleting the old names for the talk groups, if you haven't already. Then the old names for the soc groups. Then the old names for the sci and misc groups. Then for comp, then for news. If you have to remove something that hasn't been rmgrouped (that's anything except old talk names) you should alias that group to its new name, for example, if you must remove net.singles, which has been renamed soc.singles, add net.singles soc.singles to /usr/lib/news/aliases. If this fails to get things moving again, it could be that your upstream neighbor is still broken. Check /usr/lib/news/log and your UUCP logs to see if anything is coming in. Post a test message to your test newsgroup (NOT net.test.) If you believe your system is broken, fiddle with AFSIZE or LINES in defs.h, or try to temporarily remove some lines from active. Mark Horton