Xref: utzoo news.software.b:2589 news.sysadmin:2571
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.sysadmin
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: How do I issue a "sendme" control message?
Message-ID: <1989Jul19.010743.3727@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <749@icus.islp.ny.us> <1989Jul18.154058.2638@dlb.uucp>
Date: Wed, 19 Jul 89 01:07:43 GMT

In article <1989Jul18.154058.2638@dlb.uucp> dave@dlb.UUCP (Dave Buck) writes:
>By the way, we converted to "C News" recently, and the only foul gripe is
>that this type of scenerio is not possible (well, not as they've implemented
>rnews).  Their rnews will discard an incoming batch if they think it might
>not fit, and the lost article ids are not saved.  I thought about two
>approaches to change this behavior ... first thought was to scan the incoming
>batch for article ids and save them for rerequesting (nah, too difficult) ...
>second thought was to just save the incoming batch in another file system
>known to have lotsa space, and let us clean up after the following day.

If you've got somewhere you can put a batch when space runs out, or something
else useful you can do with it, great!  Unfortunately, in the general case
"there just ain't no graceful way".  Even writing to log files is risky if
they are on the same filesystem and space is really tight.  We decided that
about all we could do was (a) discard the batch, (b) send mail to $NEWSMASTER
so it wouldn't pass unnoticed (a bit risky if the mailboxes are in the same
filesystem, but silent data loss just didn't seem a good idea), and
(c) write rnews as a shell script so people who've got a better way can
change things easily.
-- 
$10 million equals 18 PM       |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
(Pentagon-Minutes). -Tom Neff  | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu