[news.admin] hand recovery of dropped news?

ambar@athena.mit.edu (Jean Marie Diaz) (05/18/87)

Recently, while editing our sys file, I managed to drop the comma
between ne and news.  Lo, suddenly every piece of news posted to
news.all ended up in junk, and there was head-scratching aplenty until I
deciphered the cryptic "newsgroup in active but not in sys" error
message.  (Ok, so it's not that cryptic...)

The question now is, what is the "correct" way for me to rescue these
articles from junk?  Reposting them locally would work for us, but not
for those sites downstream from us.  Turning off nntp (we don't have
phones), moving the articles and editing the active file by hand is
feasible, but makes me think "there's got to be an easier way".  Is
there?

				AMBAR
ARPA: ambar@eddie.mit.edu		UUCP: {backbones}!mit-eddie!ambar

mack@inco.UUCP (Dave Mack) (05/19/87)

	I recently had a similar problem (botched active file).
	The following fix *almost* worked:

	1) create an input file for batch consisting of the file
	   names (full path) in junk, one file per line. 

	2) batch namelist > junk.files

	3) expire -n junk -e 0

	4) unbatch < junk.files

	This method has two problems:

	1) It doesn't appear to work on articles with explicit 
	   expiration dates in the header (expire -e doesn't seem
	   to override.)

	2) It doesn't send them to your downstream sites. You may
	   need to feed junk.files into news another way.

	Good luck!
	Dave Mack
	inco!mack