[news.admin] help

kam@titan.tsd.arlut.utexas.edu (Katherine Minister Hosch) (07/05/89)

I you all might be able to help me out with.  The major problem that I am
having is that rnews -U or rnews -S - p don't seem to work at all.
These are invoked by expire, apparently to store news that came in
while expire was running.  However, when I have run expire in the
past (I can't run it now at all; that sad tail in a minute), after
it expires it tries to run rnews -U and rnews -S -p to unspool the
stored articles.  But rnews goes into a permanent wait state, never
moving articles and blocking incoming articles.  Consequently, we have
alot of articles in /usr/spool/news/.rnews, waiting to be unspooled.
When I run inews -U in debug mode, things seem to work okay, but
the status variable gets a value of either 5 or 133, neither of which
is okay.

I ran expire in debug mode the other day, and had to interrupt it
before it was done, and now it won't run at all.  It says it can't
open the nhistory file, although it is there.  Things are a bit of
a mess, and I am wondering what I need to do to backup to a point
that I can at least do expire, as our files are getting rather full.
Also, where can I find out where the status variable gets assigned
its value, what the values mean, and that sort of thing?  I haven't
been able to locate a description of status codes in the documentation.

Sorry if this is all too boring; the documentation is minimal, and   
doesn't tell me any of this stuff.  Thanks in advance for any
help I can get.  By the way, I'm running news 2.11 with the nntp service.


-- 
Katherine Minister Hosch:		kam@titan.tsd.arlut.utexas.edu
Applied Research Laboratories		(512)-835-3148
University of Texas at Austin
P.O. Box 8029, Austin, TX  78713-8029

glee@cognos.UUCP (Godfrey Lee) (07/08/89)

I suspect that your history file is corrupt. This has happened to me when
the system crashes during a news feed, and the subsequent expire gets stuck.

Just use expire -r to rebuilt the history files and it should be okay again.
-- 
Godfrey Lee                                            P.O. Box 9707
Cognos Incorporated                                    3755 Riverside Dr.
VOICE:  (613) 738-1338 x3802   FAX: (613) 738-0002     Ottawa, Ontario
UUCP: uunet!mitel!sce!cognos!glee                      CANADA  K1G 3Z4