mikel@codas.UUCP (07/18/86)
I posted an article last week about strange expiration dates on the
system. I didn't get much information back about why they were there.
Well now it seems like these dates are causing a REAL problem with
the usenet software here. A user informed me that he was getting
the message:
vnews: Bitmap not large enough for newsgroup net.singles
I checked the active file, and this is what it contains:
net.singles 04405 01606 y
Now while there are only 392 articles in net.singles on our machine,
article 01606 has the expiration date of "31 Dec 99 08:00:00 GMT",
the next article is 03776 with the expiration date "4 Aug 86 07:00:00 GMT",
and then the next article is 04013 which is has a normal expiration
date.
The problem is that the article numbers will keep increasing, while
article 01606 will remain here until the turn of the century...
And the spread between 01606 and whatever is current will increase
beyond the capacity of the news software (which it already has).
I know there are certain articles (like in mod.announce.conferences)
that have preset expiration dates, which have a valid reason for being
there. That is why I do not want to use the "-I" (or other) option on
expire to get rid of article 01606 (which I will purge manually).
But you go ahead and find article <218@phred.UUCP> and check the
expiration date, and then check the contents, personally I find
it hard to justify letting this stuff onto our machine, let alone
keeping it around until the turn of the century!
I present a mild suggestion to all administrators to grep or awk your
history file and look at what articles have expiration dates that are
beyond 1986, and then try to figure out what problems this will cause.
Maybe. Just Maybe, we can just figure out how <218@phred.UUCP> got
such a ghastly expiration date to begin with.
--
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/ \ Mikel Manitius @ AT&T-IS Altamonte Springs, FL
| RPI | ...{seismo!akgua|ihnp4|cbosgd|mcnc}!codas!mikel
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