[news.newusers.questions] expire returning unreadable date message

croot@aspect.UUCP (Admin) (08/15/89)

I recently received the dubious honor of setting up our connection to 
USENET.  Frankly, I've never been assigned a more frustrating task!!!

The documentation (man pages, and the nutshell book "Managing UUCP and 
Usenet") is good *unless something goes wrong*.  Note also that I *am*
the newsadmin at this site and I don't know any newsadmins at other sites 
so I'm at a loss for the kind of guidance that is most often recommended.  
(I'd love to be able to RTFM....) Is there any other source of documentation 
that might cover some of the problems I've encountered?

The newest problem is that the /usr/lib/news/history.d/* file seems to
get corrupted... I get a "unreadable date" message back from expire,
and it won't expire those articles.  When I look at the history file with
that entry in it, it looks as if one line has been only partially written
and the next line has been appended to it.  I have gone in and rectified 
the problem lines by hand, but somehow I don't think this is right solution.

Any suggestions?

Thanks....