taylor@limbo.Intuitive.Com (Dave Taylor) (12/27/89)
I've been going back and forth on a couple of configuration problems
with netnews on my machine for a while now, and hope that someone there
in netland can assist me.
Before we start:
% what /usr/bin/inews
inews.c 2.91 1/24/89
ifuncs.c 2.72 1/18/89
iextern.c 2.19 11/19/87
control.c 2.58 1/15/89
fullname.c 1.14 1/15/89
elock.c 1.3 1/19/89
funcs.c 2.39 1/15/89
funcs2.c 1.25 1/15/89
header.c 2.50 1/15/89
ndir.c 1.13 1/15/89
ftime.c 2.5 4/26/85
pathinit.c 1.26 1/15/89
% uname -a
HP-UX limbo 6.5 B 9000/340 limbo
Now, first off, what are the files in the ".rnews" directory as used by
the "rnews" program? If there are lots of 'em sitting around, as shown in
the following listing, is there some way I can force "rnews" to process
them, or should I just be deleting them to save disk space?
% ls /usr/spool/news/.rnews
total 484
-rw-rw-rw- 1 news news 68185 Dec 26 03:19 891226111925fd
-rw-rw-rw- 1 news news 51977 Dec 26 03:40 8912261140260d
-rw-rw-rw- 1 news news 3760 Dec 26 03:40 8912261140260f
-rw-rw-rw- 1 news news 16304 Dec 26 04:30 89122612302648
-rw-rw-rw- 1 news news 31146 Dec 26 05:33 89122613332698
-rw-rw-rw- 1 news news 24035 Dec 26 05:44 891226134426af
-rw-rw-rw- 1 news news 14722 Dec 26 06:52 891226145226f3
-rw-rw-rw- 1 news news 26835 Dec 26 07:08 89122615082709
(Note in this case that all files older than 1 day are automatically
deleted to save on disk space; otherwise there'd be files up to a week
old or older!)
Secondly, "rnews" in general is quite unhappy about something to do
with the local configuration: I have to turn off my log files (e.g.
chmod 000) to avoid running out of space ... when I turn them on, the
logs are rapidly filled with the following message:
% head /usr/lib/news/log
Dec 14 21:06 local freopen(5ff8): No such file or directory
Dec 14 21:06 local rnews failed, status 256. Batch saved in /usr/spool/news/.bad/5ff8
Dec 14 21:06 local freopen(5ffa): No such file or directory
Dec 14 21:06 local rnews failed, status 256. Batch saved in /usr/spool/news/.bad/5ffa
Dec 14 21:06 local freopen(5ffc): No such file or directory
Dec 14 21:06 local rnews failed, status 256. Batch saved in /usr/spool/news/.bad/5ffc
% head /usr/lib/news/errlog
Dec 14 21:06 news inews: freopen(5ff8): No such file or directory
Dec 14 21:06 Unknown inews: rnews failed, status 256. Batch saved in /usr/spool/news/.bad/5ff8
Dec 14 21:06 news inews: freopen(5ffa): No such file or directory
Dec 14 21:06 Unknown inews: rnews failed, status 256. Batch saved in /usr/spool/news/.bad/5ffa
Dec 14 21:06 news inews: freopen(5ffc): No such file or directory
Dec 14 21:06 Unknown inews: rnews failed, status 256. Batch saved in /usr/spool/news/.bad/5ffc
yet if we go look in /usr/spool/news/.bad ...
% ls -la /usr/spool/news/.bad
total 4
drwxrwxrwx 2 news news 64 Jul 7 11:11 ./
drwxrwxrwx 27 news news 1024 Dec 14 21:06 ../
As you can see, nothing is obviously wrong, and there are plenty of inodes
and space on the disk that netnews lives on:
% df -t /netnews
/netnews (/dev/dsk/3s0 ): 54168 blocks 12753 i-nodes
82286 total blocks 15680 total i-nodes
19888 used blocks 2927 used i-nodes
10 percent minfree
(over 13,000 inodes and 27MB available)
The third problem is that articles that are "spooled up for later processing"
in fact just vanish completely from the system. Where does "inews"
typically expect to put things, and how are they processed later?
Anyway, these problems have definitely become a bit of a plague here on
Limbo, and my netnews readers and I would be eternally grateful for any
assistance or hints in tracking down any of these insidious configuration
problems. Thank you very much for your help, and Happy New Year to all!
-- Dave Taylor
Intuitive Systems
Mountain View, California
taylor@limbo.intuitive.com or {uunet!}{decwrl,apple}!limbo!taylornews@puzzle.UUCP (newshound) (12/27/89)
In article <259@limbo.Intuitive.Com> taylor@limbo.Intuitive.Com (Dave Taylor) writes: >Now, first off, what are the files in the ".rnews" directory as used by >the "rnews" program? If there are lots of 'em sitting around, as shown in >the following listing, is there some way I can force "rnews" to process >them, or should I just be deleting them to save disk space? They're article batches that haven't been unbatched yet. You can run rnews -U until they're gone, or rnews -S < 89???????????? on each one. >The third problem is that articles that are "spooled up for later processing" >in fact just vanish completely from the system. Where does "inews" >typically expect to put things, and how are they processed later? Do you have a /usr/spool/news/.tmp directory? Can the general public write into /tmp? To get those (spooled for later processing) articles taken care of, have news, through cron, run rnews -U at least once a day, preferably when expire has no chance of running. Good luck! -- Bob (attctc!puzzle!bei)