garry@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Garry Wiegand) (12/05/86)
I'm running rn 4.3 and news 2.11 on a BSD 4.3 Gould. I was editing an 'f' followup when I exceeded my disk space quota and my (dumb) editor crashed followed immediately by rn locking up (either a spin or keyboard trouble; not sure.) I killed the login shell, returned, and discovered that my .newsrc file was completely empty. I eventually discovered the existence of ".oldnewsrc" but by then it was empty too. Inasmuch as we have >300 newgroups nowadays, reconstructing the .newsrc from scratch was a trifle painful. Could we please arrange that rn grab a "lot" of space for its files to start (and truncate on exit) to avoid quota problems? Also, why was the .newsrc completely empty?? Arrrgh. garry wiegand (garry%cadif-oak@cu-arpa.cs.cornell.edu)
greg@utcsri.UUCP (Gregory Smith) (12/06/86)
In article <1707@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> garry%cadif-oak@cu-arpa.cs.cornell.edu writes: >I'm running rn 4.3 and news 2.11 on a BSD 4.3 Gould. I was editing an 'f' >followup when I exceeded my disk space quota and my (dumb) editor crashed >followed immediately by rn locking up (either a spin or keyboard trouble; >not sure.) I killed the login shell, returned, and discovered that my .newsrc >file was completely empty. I eventually discovered the existence of >".oldnewsrc" but by then it was empty too. > >Inasmuch as we have >300 newgroups nowadays, reconstructing the .newsrc >from scratch was a trifle painful. > >... why was the .newsrc completely empty?? I too have been burned by this once. Once. The .newsrc file is updated frequently during rn, in the usual UN*X manner of writing the whole thing out and deleting the old one. Apparently, the update fails because the disk is full and the delete goes ahead anyway ( Actually, the old one is renamed to .oldnewsrc, and the old .oldnewsrc is deleted, but you can still get burned). > >Arrrgh. Yup. Put 'cp .newsrc .OLDnewsrc' in your login. This will fail only if the disk is full when you login, and you shouldn't go on to read the news if that happens. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Greg Smith University of Toronto UUCP: ..utzoo!utcsri!greg Have vAX, will hack...