Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!sci34hub!gary From: gary@sci34hub.UUCP (Gary Heston) Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions Subject: Re: news.announce.newusers (was Re: Reader polls) Summary: you ask for it..... Message-ID: <407@sci34hub.UUCP> Date: 14 Nov 89 02:38:31 GMT References: <8911091544.AA21726@thep.lu.se> <3032@splut.conmicro.com> Lines: 65 In article <3032@splut.conmicro.com>, jay@splut.conmicro.com (Jay Maynard) writes: > In article <110@toaster.SFSU.EDU> eps@cs.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott) writes: > >>How is a new user supposed to even learn of the EXISTENCE of those > >>news.announce.newusers articles in the first place? (given that many sites > >>expire them at a rate more frequent than they arrive) > Right. All it takes is a line in crontab: > 0 2 * * * /usr/lib/news/expire -e2 -i > Real special effort, that. (Yes, I expire news here after 2 days.) [.....] > Until I get news 3.0 running here, or figure out a way to expire > news.announce.newusers under different rules than all other groups > without running expire twice, it'll stay that way, too. Ok, Jay, you ask for it.... 0 2 * * * /usr/lib/news/expire -n all !news.announce.newusers -e2 -i You can also run on a specific newsgroup, with this syntax: 0 1 * * * /usr/lib/news/expire -n news.announce.newusers -e100 to prevent things from hanging around beyond the three-month reposting (with a 10-day cushion, to allow for net.propagation). Running on a single group like that should take a lot less time. You also need only do it weekly, say, on Monday morning when you don't want to get up early. :-) I believe you will find info on this in the man page for expire. To quote several other net.persons, and assuming that by now you're groaning and hiding your face, Read The Fine Manual!! :-) Also, I suspect you're a fairly limited site, in user numbers. In your case (speaking to the rest of the inexperienced admins/ users), archiving the articles would be sensible, so you wouldn't have to deal with expiring them. Where there's lots of newuser activity (college systems, etc.) keeping them online is better (of course, they generally have far more resources to put to this use than we do). When you get a chance, look at your newsdir and see if you have some rather large directory entries. That will slow things down a whole lot; it can be fixed by replicating with cpio -p or by dumping to tape and DELETING the structure (so that dirs are re-created with the minimum number of entries necessary), then restoring. My major expire run takes about 35 minutes, on a 386 multibus machine with a 150MB SCSI drive dedicated to news, about 100MB used. I think your expire should run faster. I don't use the -i option on mine, either. > Jay Maynard, EMT-P, K5ZC, PP-ASEL | Never ascribe to malice that which can > jay@splut.conmicro.com (eieio)| adequately be explained by stupidity. > {attctc,bellcore}!texbell!splut!jay +---------------------------------------- > Shall we try for comp.protocols.tcp-ip.eniac next, Richard? - Brandon Allbery P.S. I passed your last posting about the ISC 386/ix inode eating bug to our Technical Support people. They appreciated it. Thanks! -- Gary Heston { uunet!sci34hub!gary } System Mismanager SCI Technology, Inc. OEM Products Department (i.e., computers) Hestons' First Law: I qualify virtually everything I say.