[news.software.b] Questions

jep@fantasci.UUCP (Joseph E Poplawski ) (09/26/88)

Hello. I have a few questions that hopefully the readers of this group will be
able to answer for me.

1. my system sometimes becomes VERY tight on disk space.  What I would like is
   to have a script that I could run that would EXPIRE and PHYSICALLY remove
   every news article in a list of groups.  I would want to do this without
   having to run 'expire' in a normal way since there are days where I need to
   even remove the articles received that day.

2. could someone please explain how to use KILL files...  How to 'kill' articles
   from a certain user, ones with certain subjects, etc.

Please reply via E-Mail and I will summarize.

Thanks in advance.

-Jo
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|Joseph E Poplawski  (Jo)                     US Mail:  1621 Jackson Street   |
|                                                       Cinnaminson NJ 08077  |
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dtynan@sultra.UUCP (Der Tynan) (09/27/88)

In article <196@fantasci.UUCP>, jep@fantasci.UUCP (Joseph E Poplawski ) writes:
> 
> 1. my system sometimes becomes VERY tight on disk space.  What I would like is
>    to have a script that I could run that would EXPIRE and PHYSICALLY remove
>    every news article in a list of groups.  I would want to do this without
>    having to run 'expire' in a normal way since there are days where I need to
>    even remove the articles received that day.
> -Jo

I have been thinking about this particular problem for some time.  I think I
have a clean solution.  But first, some background...  Due to similar problems
I have had to discard some major news categories (alt, soc, etc), in order
to keep the disk usage to a minimum.  Unfortunately, the biggest disk hog is
comp.all, which I cannot/will not block.  Anyway, I don't mind the actual
I/O bandwidth, but the disk usage is almost criminal (most of the applications
here generate *huge* chunks of data).  It's hard to get authorization for more
disk space, when ~40 Mb is being eaten up by news!  I have sent messages to
our newsfeed to stop certain news categories, but in reality, I'd like to block
individual groups, which is something that would cause our feed's sys file to
grow to an enormous size.  The perfect solution would be for me to send mail to
a daemon at the newsfeed site, which would process the message body into
requests to stop/start certain newsgroups.  For example, no-one here reads
comp.os.vms, but it's a pretty large newsgroup (at least recently, anyway).  A
newsfeed would then have a file that looked something like this...

comp.os.vms:systema, systemb, systemc
comp.unix.sys5:systemb, systemc

In this way, *only* those individual newsgroups would be sent to the named
sites.  It is imperative of course, that such a system be linked with a
mail-daemon, as the number of requests to add/drop newsgroups could be
horrendous.  For example, I could have a cron utility that would check all
the .newsrc files once a week, and check what groups are subscribed to.  Then,
any changes would be mailed to the daemon at our newsfeed, which would update
its database, and the next news batch would have the new group (or remove the
old one).  I think this system would be a big win for systems with limited
space.

In the meantime, I'm going to implement a simple system into B2.11, for my
own use.  This system will access a file called /usr/lib/news/accept, when
running rnews.  A check will be performed to see if the relevant newsgroup
is in the list.  If not, it will dump the article.  I will also put together
a cron utility to check the .newsrc files, as I said earlier, and update this
accept file.  I welcome any comments anyone has, and would like to know what
other sites have done in this regard.  Thanks...
						- Der
-- 
Reply:	dtynan@sultra.UUCP		(Der Tynan @ Tynan Computers)
	{mips,pyramid}!sultra!dtynan
	Cast a cold eye on life, on death.  Horseman, pass by...    [WBY]