abrams@bnlux0 (The Ancient Programmer) (02/15/90)
I am running News 2.11.18 and an having a problem with "strange" files. Periodically, my News spool is being inundated with files with long numeric names in the /usr/spool/news and /usr/spool/news/.rnews directories. One such file is .../news/.rnews/9002045647f3. It has a message id of <5132@sugar.hackercorp.com> and a creation date/time of Feb. 9 09:56(EST). There is no record of this article in the log or history file, but grep shows a <5132@sugar.hackercorp.com> article in the log and history files with a creation date/time of Feb. 9, 14:06(EST) and a path of news.comp.sys.amiga.tech/10073. Sure enough, an article news/comp/sys/amiga/tech/10073 was created on Feb. 9, 14:06(EST). A diff of both articles shows only one difference, and that is in the Path: entry. In the .rnews copy of the article, my sitename is missing from the path, while in the news/comp/sys/amiga/tech/10073 copy, my sitename appears in the path. In addition, expire seems to hang when processing these files with long numeric names. Has anyone had similar problems? Does anyone have any idea about what is going on here?
gary@sci34hub.UUCP (Gary Heston) (02/17/90)
In article <1678@bnlux0.bnl.gov>, abrams@bnlux0 (The Ancient Programmer) writes: > I am running News 2.11.18 and an having a problem with "strange" files. > Periodically, my News spool is being inundated with files with long numeric > names in the /usr/spool/news and /usr/spool/news/.rnews directories. One such > file is .../news/.rnews/9002045647f3. This is a temporary file created by inews, I think, during the unbatch/ post process. It should be removed (by inews) after it's properly posted. Occasionally a few (or, in a couple of cases I ran into when things weren't working quite right, a few thousand) get left behind. > [ ... ] > In addition, expire seems to hang when processing these files with > long numeric names. Expire should never see them. Make sure you're not running expire while news is being posted, and this problem should not occur. Expiring while posting can also cause other problems, with the history and active files, if they should happen to try and modify them at the same time. > Has anyone had similar problems? Does anyone have any idea about > what is going on here? Yep. These things happen... BTW, expire, when it completes, executes a rnews with a option to clean up and post leftover files, which should clear out everything in the .rnews directory. If this isn't happening, check the ownership and group of the files--my inews seems to randomly group files to sys and bin as well as news. Expire won't remove files that aren't in the group news. -- Gary Heston { uunet!sci34hub!gary } System Mismanager SCI Technology, Inc. OEM Products Department (i.e., computers) Hestons' First Law: I qualify virtually everything I say.