Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!bloom-beacon!ambar From: ambar@bloom-beacon.mit.edu (Jean Marie Diaz) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: More duplicates from 19 October Message-ID: Date: 21 Nov 89 01:12:05 GMT References: <1989Nov12.221000.13228@rpi.edu> <8911141740.AA15357@uakari.primate.wisc.edu> Sender: news@athena.mit.edu (News system) Organization: Redheads Anonymous Lines: 38 In-Reply-To: Brain in Neutral's message of Tue, 14 Nov 89 11:40:06 -0600 <8911141740.AA15357@uakari.primate.wisc.edu> [mail failed; hence post] Date: Tue, 14 Nov 89 11:40:06 -0600 From: Brain in Neutral > I suspect that mintaka's other feeds > a) are running the nntpsend script > written in Perl, which tends to trash batch files for sites > that don't respond, or This is news to me and I am a bit surprised, since the perl nntpsend doesn't do anything with the batch files after forking the nntpxmit. What are the particulars of how files are trashed? Well, I'll explain the different behaviours I've seen. We have an nntp feed to a site with a flakey Internet connection. Pre-perl, the batch file would grow, and a sitename.nntp file would also be present. The next attempt to send after a transmission failure would begin by using the sitename.nntp file already present, and nothing would be lost. Post-perl, any sitename.nntp files left by previous (failed) transmission attempts just get overwritten (I suspect), since the result is that the queue is always short. I don't care enough to have bothered to fix it (or even report it, you might have noticed :-), but someone else might. > I'll bet the problem is oliveb->mintaka. mintaka has been down for the > past two weeks with disk problems, and I just brought it back from the > dead last night (running C News instead of B News 3.0). Also, how could trashing a batch file result in transmission of old news? I would think that that would result, instead, in a loss of news. Precisely. The problem is oliveb->mintaka; I suspect mintaka's _other_ feeds have trashed (or deliberately shortened) their batch files, and that's why we're only having trouble with oliveb. AMBAR