[news.software.b] History and active getting blown away?

chet@arc.UUCP (Chet Wood) (03/01/90)

I'm running B News 2.11.19 on a Sun 4/370 running SunOS 4.0.3. I've
had it up for a few weeks, and this is the second time that the
history file has disappeared. This time, the active file disappeared,
too. I can recover history from ohistory and run expire to rebuild it,
but I don't know how to rebuild active. oactive was truncated to 0
bytes. I have a backup from a couple of days ago, but how to bring it
up to date?

This apparently happened when my cleannews script was running.
cleannews runs expire several times with different parameters. From
the appearance of cleannews' output log, it almost looks as if 2
cleannews processes were running simultaneously. But there is only a
single entry in crontab-- I just checked.???

I got two identical messages from cron, with the output: 

expire: Bogus local distribution rejected
expire: Cannot open /var/spool/news-lib/history (r): No such file or directory

Later messages reported the active file missing.

In the cleannews log, everything was duplicated but slightly offset in time:

02/28/90 01:01:01  expire all ?? exit code 1 ??
02/28/90 01:01:02  expire all ?? exit code 1 ??
02/28/90 01:02:52  expire junk 
02/28/90 01:04:20  expire junk 
02/28/90 01:04:21  expire rec,soc,talk ?? exit code 1 ??
02/28/90 01:04:25  trimlib 
02/28/90 01:04:26  expire rec,soc,talk 
02/28/90 01:04:29  trimlib 
02/28/90 01:11:30  disk space: 151211	/var/spool/news

If anyone could offer help on either of two problems, I would
supremely appreciate it. 

1. How to restore my active file?

2. Advice on what is causing this?

Please respond by mail, as my news system is obviously down !=)

Thanks,

Chet.

--
Chet Wood                       ~                         (408)727-3357
     arc!chet@apple.COM         .  Advansoft Research Corporation
          chet@arc.UUCP         .       4301 Great America Parkway
               apple!arc!chet   .            Santa Clara, CA 95054, USA

karl@ficc.uu.net (Karl Lehenbauer) (03/03/90)

Running out of disk space during an expire can trash your history file in Bnews.

Being out of disk space in your spool partition at the start of an expire
can trash your active file in Bnews.  (at least some parts of news create
temp files in the spool partition, including a copy of active)
-- 
-- uunet!ficc!karl  "Lack of skill dictates economy of style." -- Joey Ramone
   uunet!sugar!karl