dab@esl.ESL.COM (David A. Brown) (07/26/89)
I've recently installed news on a Sun 3 running SunOS 4.0.1, and
everything works fine except expire. The first problem I noticed was
that after doing a normal expiration, almost all newsgroups in the
active file had their 'min' article numbers set equal to the 'max'
numbers (i.e. that all these newsgroups had exactly one message).
This wasn't true; the spool directory was full of articles that the
active file said weren't there.
So, I tried the -r option. This was worse: it seemed that expire went
through the spool directory but hardly found any articles -- I got
debugging output like
esl# /usr/lib/news/expire -r -v4
expire: nohistory 1, rebuild 1, doarchive 0
newsgroups: all,
article: comp.sys.sun/5
article: comp.sys.sun/9
article: comp.sys.sun/3
article: comp.sys.sun/7
article: comp.sys.sun/7
article: comp.sys.sun/5
article: comp.sys.sun/9
article: comp.sys.sun/3
article: comp.sys.sun/7
article: comp.sys.sun/5
article: comp.sys.sun/9
article: comp.sys.sun/3
article: comp.sys.sun/9
article: comp.sys.sun/3
article: comp.sys.sun/7
article: comp.sys.sun/5
article: comp.sys.sun/9
updating active file /usr/lib/news/active
looking at group ba.food
looking at group ba.general
etc...
So, my history file ends up with just a few lines, consisting of those
same articles in comp.sys.sun over and over. I can't find anything
special about comp.sys.sun, or about any messages in it. Also, my
active file looks okay (before it gets all its min article numbers
screwed up).
My setup is almost completely vanilla v7, except I set LNRNEWS to
'ln -s' and changed some random stuff in defs.h like MYDOMAIN,
INTERNET and DOXREFS. Also, /usr/spool is a symbolic link to
/var/spool, and /var/spool/news is a link to /esl/news (I keep news
articles on a filesystem with lots of space).
Has anybody seen a problem like this? I'm really surprised that this
is happening because I'm using news 'right out of the box', and inews
and rn all seem to work perfectly (I got the latest news distribution
from uunet and applied all the patches). I don't think there's a
problem with having /usr/spool/news as a symbolic link -- it was that
way on our Vax (which was just replaced by the Sun). I can't remember
ever hearing about a problem like this on the net -- I'd appreciate
any help or suggestions...
Thanks,
- David Brown ESL Inc., Sunnyvale CA (408) 738-2888 x6695
dab@esl.esl.com or ...ames!esl!dab