stevesc@microsoft.UUCP (Steve Schonberger) (11/30/89)
Excuse me if this already exists in some expire programs. I haven't seen it. If your news spool is temporarily very close to full, it would be nice if expire were to kill off more articles than the number of days requested would otherwise kill. It would be nice to give expire an option to trash articles that otherwise aren't old enough to get rid of. A flag telling what newsgroups are suggested for accellerated expiration in the event of space problems would be most useful, at least from my superficial consideration of the problem. In other words, make it so you can expire stuff the usual way, but if space is still over 80% full, expire an extra day of rec.humor (or whatever). -- Steve Schonberger microsoft!stevesc@uunet.uu.net "Working under pressure is the sugar that we crave" --A. Lamb
zeeff@b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us (Jon Zeeff) (11/30/89)
>If your news spool is temporarily very close to full, it would be nice >if expire were to kill off more articles than the number of days >requested would otherwise kill. It would be nice to give expire an If you can switch to C news, I will soon be posting a version of rnews that does a progressive expire if space is low. It eliminates guessing what you should expire at to prevent disk space problems and allows you to run right at the edge of a full disk. -- Jon Zeeff <zeeff@b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us> Branch Technology <zeeff@b-tech.mi.org>
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (12/01/89)
In article <9208@microsoft.UUCP> stevesc@microsoft.UUCP (Steve Schonberger) writes: >If your news spool is temporarily very close to full, it would be nice >if expire were to kill off more articles than the number of days >requested would otherwise kill... You can do this sort of thing with C News expire by dynamically generating control files for it. I looked a bit at giving it more built-in smarts about space, but doing anything intelligent about that is a bit tricky. I eventually decided that people generating control files dynamically can be arbitrarily clever, so I shouldn't try to duplicate their efforts. :-) -- Mars can wait: we've barely | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology started exploring the Moon. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
tim@fortytwo.UUCP (Tim Baker) (12/04/89)
In article <9208@microsoft.UUCP> stevesc@microsoft.UUCP (Steve Schonberger) writes: >If your news spool is temporarily very close to full, it would be nice >if expire were to kill off more articles than the number of days >requested would otherwise kill. It would also be nice if rnews would stop if there is no more room on the spool directory. If there is not enough space, rnews just keeps spitting out error messages and trashes all the news it is trying to process. This may only occur with sites with space limitations, but it would be a nice feature for us. Thanks for listening. -- == Tim Baker | think!fortytwo!tim or | We all need new frontiers. == == | uunet!hbiso!fortytwo!tim | - Journey ==
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (12/05/89)
In article <247@fortytwo.UUCP> tim@fortytwo.UUCP (Tim Baker) writes: >It would also be nice if rnews would stop if there is no more room on the >spool directory. If there is not enough space, rnews just keeps spitting >out error messages and trashes all the news it is trying to process. >This may only occur with sites with space limitations, but it would be >a nice feature for us. Fixed in C News, to the extent that a graceful fix is possible. -- Mars can wait: we've barely | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology started exploring the Moon. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
admin@cs.exeter.ac.uk (Khalid Sattar) (12/05/89)
>>>>> In article <247@fortytwo.UUCP>, tim@fortytwo.UUCP (Tim Baker) writes:
Tim> It would also be nice if rnews would stop if there is no more room on the
Tim> spool directory. If there is not enough space, rnews just keeps spitting
Tim> out error messages and trashes all the news it is trying to process.
Tim> This may only occur with sites with space limitations, but it would be
Tim> a nice feature for us.
We have solved this problem only recenlty. I found a useful
undocumented feature of expire. If you specify -X to expire it will
not run "rnews -U" (we spool all incomming news). Then I have a small
script (perl - but it should be easy enough to write one with shell
and awk) that checks for free space and calls one batched file at a
time using rnews -S... until all batch files have been unbatched or
the amount of space on spool is less that desired. Below is header of
that script. We have been running it for past 6 days and its working
very well.
# This script will unbatch the news checking for free disk, the time
# and the maximum number of files to unbatch.
#
# Options:
# -f n keep n kbytes free on the spool
# -m n only unbatch a maximum of n batch files
# -i ignore time - ie do it in working hours too
# -n No execute mode - what will happen without happening
PS: We also have another script that will only call another site for
news if there is sufficient space and once the trasnfer is in progress,
further invocations (via cron) checks if there is a call in progress
if it is then checks the disk and kills the connection if necessary.
--
Khalid Sattar JANET : admin@uk.ac.exeter.cs
Computer Science Dept. UUCP : admin@expya.uucp
University of Exeter BITNET : admin%uk.ac.exeter.cs@ukacrl
Exeter, UK. Tel : +44 392 264062