burton@parcvax.Xerox.COM (Philip M. Burton) (09/19/87)
My system, parcvax, is administered really by people who have full-time jobs, and help out as they can, "in their spare time." They have tried to address this problem, but they are stumped. A *few* newsgroups seem to have a "one day" expire. Most groups are fine. Now, the articles in question are all still in the spool files, and I can always read them there using cat or more. (Pain!!!) But, one of the groups in question, comp.sys.ibm.pc, is one of my favorites. We had a brief discussion internally about this, and the suggestions for using a different news reader or editing my .newsrc file didn't solve the problem. I use rn, and we are a BSD 4.3 site. Apparently, the problem has something to do with the "active files". I'm not a developer or a UNIX expert. I just use the system for news, mail, and arpanet access. Can anyone advise on how to proceed. Please bear in mind that I will package the replies and send them on to the administrators. I wouldn't even think of doing anything myself, even if I had the privileges. Has anyone else encountered this problem? -- Philip Burton burton@parcvax.COM ...!hplabs!parcvax!burton Xerox Corp. preferred path: burton.osbunorth@xerox.COM 408 737 4635 ... usual disclaimers apply ...
dhb@rayssd.RAY.COM (David H. Brierley) (09/23/87)
In article <521@parcvax.Xerox.COM> burton@parcvax.Xerox.COM (Philip M. Burton) writes: ... >A *few* newsgroups seem to have a "one day" expire. Most groups are fine. >Now, the articles in question are all still in the spool files, and I can >always read them there using cat or more. (Pain!!!) But, one of the >groups in question, comp.sys.ibm.pc, is one of my favorites. > This sounds very similar to a problem I had on one of our HP workstations. It seems that when expire is all done expiring articles it then attempts to rebuild the "active" file. Rather than keeping track of what it has expired as it went along, it does this by going to each directory in the spool area and reading it. If it finds a directory that it can't read it simply updates the active file to indicate that there are no articles available. The question is, why couldn't it read the directory. On our HP system it turned out that the directory reading code that was supplied with news 2.11 didn't work and all I had to do was convince the makefile that the system had the directory routines in the standard library. In you case it might be that expire isn't running setuid to news or that the directory permissions are wrong. Also, check to make sure you aren't running more than one expire with different options. -- David H. Brierley Raytheon Submarine Signal Division 1847 West Main Road Portsmouth, RI 02871 Phone: (401)-847-8000 x4073 Internet: dhb@rayssd.ray.com Uucp: {cbosgd, gatech, linus, mirror, necntc, uiucdcs} !rayssd!dhb