[news.sysadmin] expire destroys active and history files

alan@metasoft.UUCP (Alan Epstein) (05/03/89)

i'm looking for clues as to why a mysterious behaviour is
occurring (running news 2.11).

everything has been running ok for a quite a while. recently i
made some changes in 'sys' to exclude news groups, and that
seems to be functioning ok, EXCEPT that when expire runs it
variously deletes the active or the history files. i'm sometimes
able to fix sys to stop this by rearranging lines, etc, but
there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why.

it may be interesting to note that the sys file has multiple
continuation lines, but is well under the 1024 character limit.

are there some other undocumented constraints on the sys file,
or is there some other entirely different poltergeist that i'm
facing?

PLEASE SEND REPLIES VIA E-MAIL.

thanks.

-----------------------------
Alan Epstein
Meta Software Corp                   UUCP:  ...bbn!metasoft!alan
150 Cambridgepark Dr        Internet/ARPA:  alan%metasoft@bbn.com
Cambridge, MA 02140  USA
-----------------------------

dws@cseg.uucp (David W. Summers) (05/07/89)

In article <754@metasoft.UUCP>, alan@metasoft.UUCP (Alan Epstein) writes:
> 
> i'm looking for clues as to why a mysterious behaviour is
> occurring (running news 2.11).
> 
> everything has been running ok for a quite a while. recently i
> made some changes in 'sys' to exclude news groups, and that
> seems to be functioning ok, EXCEPT that when expire runs it
> variously deletes the active or the history files. i'm sometimes
> able to fix sys to stop this by rearranging lines, etc, but
> there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why.

I seem to have a quite different problem, but since a few people seem to be
having problems with expire I thought I'd mention mine.  The 'expire' program
was running great for months and months and then I upgraded to 2.11.17 and then
I began having problems (sort of).  I keep running across articles which I'm 
SURE should be expired and they aren't!  For instance, one article said to
expire on April 20th but it is still there!  If NetNews 3.0 doesn't come out
pretty soon (within the next couple of weeks) then I may back down to 
NetNews B 2.11.17.  Anybody have any ideas?  Have I missed some extraneous
patches to the current version of NetNews?  I did run a history re-building
expire a week or so ago and it seemed to clear up an enormous amount of space
but then within a day or so it was back to the same old thing of running out
of I-nodes.  I may try a history re-build again, but it seems to take HOURS
instead of the 20-30 minutes that expire normally takes my AT&T 3B2/400
running Sys V Rel. 3.1.  (I can't wait to upgrade to 3.2 and get rid of the
I-Node bug problem!).

   Any suggestions, comments, ideas, etc. appreciated.

   - David Summers
     (dws@cseg.uucp)