alexis@panix.UUCP (Alexis Rosen) (02/11/90)
Our system has been core dumping in expire for over a month now. I just caught the tail end of a discussion about this in this group, but it didn't have any information I could use to fix the problem. I know absolutely nothing about how news works internally, but with a fair amount of exploration I discovered the /usr/lib/news/history and /user/lib/news/history.d/{0-9} files. Unfortunately, fgrepping through all of them yielded only one line that might plausibly be causing expire to choke (it had a seven-digit number as it's 2nd field, and if I'm right in assuming it's a longint for seconds since 1970, that would indeed be a bad date). I used all the bad dates reported by expire as input to fgrep, so if the problem were in the history files, I think I should have seen it... On the other hand, if I knew what I was doing, I wouldn't be asking for help. This is a sample of the output from expire: expire: : Unparsable date "62.22615@santra.uucp> 628739181" expire: : Unparsable date "6ca> 630083756" expire: : Unparsable date "6300855@cup.portal.com> 630086057" expire: : Unparsable date "ragon.waterloo.edu> 628252187" expire: : Unparsable date "6284edu> 628440723" expire: : Unparsable date "6285s.Philips.Com> 628506653" While I can't stand it when people say "I don't read this group but could you please tell me...", I would appreciate email on this. I *will* be reading this group, but there's no guarantee that any particular article will ever be despooled here (sort of chicken-and-egg). In summary, I don't need to know why it happened (though that would be nice), I need to know how to fix it. I'm running 2.11.17 (18?) B news on a SysVR2 (A/UX) machine. Or trying to... Thanks, Alexis Rosen sysadmin, Panix alexis@panix.uucp {apple,cmcl2}!panix!alexis