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