news@orcenl.uucp (News adm'r, Bjorn Engsig) (11/21/88)
I recently had to do restore the news-spool and news-lib directories from
a backup, and this caused me some problems. The backups are made by our
computer department, and I think it was made concurrently with the
receiving of news from our backbone. This implied that the active file
did not correctly show the contents of the backup, and as a result, I got
messages like
Nov 15 16:28 hp4nl Cannot install article as /usr/spool/news/comp/sys/atari/st/76: File exists
in the log-file, when we started receiving news again.
The sequence file was of course also rolled back, and new articles were then
rejected by our other machines and the backbone, since they had an already
existing message-id.
What is a safe scheme to do backups of the news directories?
Is it possible to 'turn off' all news activity by a simple mechanism,
which could then be part of the backup procedure.
Please mail replies, I will post a follow-up if there is an interest.
--
Usenet administrator (Bjorn Engsig) at ORACLE Europe, Naarden, The Netherlands.
news@orcenl.uucp, ..!mcvax!orcenl!{usenet,news} Phone: +31 21 59 56 411