[news.software.b] Strange problem with Cnews

rosenblg@cmcl2.NYU.EDU (Gary J. Rosenblum) (12/14/90)

i've been experiencing a strange problem with Cnews lately.  here's the
scenario - on machine "anyway", i receive news via nntp.  since i'm testing
it against bnews, i have newsrunning on all the time (maybe my problem?).
all of a sudden, i notice that no news is being transferred to it, so i run
the nntpxmit by hand and see that the following goes on:

anywaysend: [24818] begin anyway.nyu.edu
time nntpxmit -d ${host}:${send}
nntpxmit -d anyway.nyu.edu:anyway
200 anyway NNTP[auth] server version 1.5.10 (2 September 1990) ready at Thu Dec 13 22:32:52 1990 (posting ok).
>>> IHAVE <8761@lanl.gov>
nntpxmit: anyway.nyu.edu xfer: ihave
nntpxmit: requeue(/usr/spool/news/rec/ham-radio/72817)
nntpxmit: cleanup()
nntpxmit: rewrite(anyway)
nntpxmit: copying the unused portion of anyway to /tmp/nntpxmita24821
nntpxmit: writing failed article filenames to /tmp/nntpxmita24821
nntpxmit: wrote 1 article filenames to /tmp/nntpxmita24821
nntpxmit: copying /tmp/nntpxmita24821 back to anyway
nntpxmit: requeue(): reset
nntpxmit: rewrite(anyway): done
>>> QUIT
nntpxmit: anyway.nyu.edu stats 1 offered 0 accepted 0 rejected 0 failed
nntpxmit: anyway.nyu.edu xmit user 1.5 system 0.8 elapsed 6.8
anywaysend: [24818] end anyway.nyu.edu

so it always quits after 1 negotiation.  running mkdbm and mkhistory (not at
the same time) has not helped; strangely, i ran 'mkdbm history' once and
while it was rebuilding, news transferred perfectly.  the problem cleared up
two days ago after the expiry ran, but happened again during the middle of
the day.  any clues?  sounds like a bad dbm or history file, but i don't want
to change anything until i know for sure.  thanks.

					gary

Gary J. Rosenblum	
UNIX Systems Manager			rosenblg@nyu.edu
New York University			gary@nyu.edu

henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (12/14/90)

In article <52846@cmcl2.NYU.EDU> rosenblg@cmcl2.NYU.EDU (Gary J. Rosenblum) writes:
>... strangely, i ran 'mkdbm history' once and
>while it was rebuilding, news transferred perfectly.  the problem cleared up
>two days ago after the expiry ran, but happened again during the middle of
>the day.  any clues?  sounds like a bad dbm or history file...

Are you sure that nntp and C News agree on the format of the history index?
Dbm and dbz are **NOT** file-compatible.  Both nntp and relaynews want to
do history lookups; they must agree on the file format.  If you're using dbz
in C News, you must do likewise in nntpd and friends.
-- 
"The average pointer, statistically,    |Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
points somewhere in X." -Hugh Redelmeier| henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry