Xref: utzoo news.software.b:3551 news.software.nntp:416 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!ark1!ark1!dsill From: dsill@ark1.nswc.navy.mil (Dave Sill) Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.software.nntp Subject: B/C News woes Message-ID: <1989Nov17.162448.22026@relay.nswc.navy.mil> Date: 17 Nov 89 16:24:48 GMT Sender: news@relay.nswc.navy.mil (News) Reply-To: Dave Sill Organization: Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren VA Lines: 118 Well, it's been a helluva week. In the beginning, I was running B News 2.10 and NNTP 1.5, and for the most part everything worked as expected. But occasionally we'd get an article posted invalidly to a moderated group which would cause ark1 to try to respond to the poster by mail. For several days. Hundreds of attempts. I eventually posted a query here and learned how to stop this condition. So I said to myself, this must be a result of running such an old version of News; it's time to switch to B News 2.11.17 (which was handy). The upgrade to 2.11.17 was fairly uneventful. Too uneventful, in fact, because the aforementioned problem remained. I also started getting *lots* of duplicate articles. Again, I decided that upgrading, to 2.11.19, was the solution to my problems. I fetched the patches from tut, installed them, and built and installed the new version. Yes, I ran `make upgrade'. This time, the upgrade was *not* uneventful. I immediately noticed trouble with the active file. Some piece of software didn't seem to understand that the min/max fields were widened, and I had article sequences like 345, 346, 34746, 34846 ... 2, 3, 4 ... I quickly pulled the plug on news by disabling nntpd, but the damage was done. I tried manually patching the active file and reinstalling the software, but that didn't work. I would have killed for a utility that could fix my active file or remove the thousands of duplicate articles. Well, by now I was desparate. I contemplated wiping out /usr/spool/news and starting from scratch. I had two weeks of articles there, and I didn't want to do that. I decided to try backing down to 2.11.17. This was not a wise thing to do. In the process of reversing patches 19 and 18, something got botched. Faced with the prospect of fetching 2.11.?? and installing N patches, I decided instead that now might be a good time to try C News. I mean, things couldn't get worse. After installing the patches up to Sep14 and reading the docs, I built and installed C News, and NNTP 1.5.7 since it contained the mods necessary for batching with C News. Before I plugged it in, though, I wanted to get my active file and history squared away. Hmmm... `mkhistory' ... that's just the ticket. After cranking away for 2-3 hours it bombed out when awk bombed out saying "11034@foo.bar... line too long". It turned out this was one of the articles that I'd received 50-100 duplicates of, and histdups couldn't handle it. Okay, well maybe `recovact' would take care of the active file, at least. Nope, those bogus 5-digit articles would have to go first, as well as the bogus 2, 3, 4... articles. It only took two hours or so to dired /usr/spool/news and remove all the bogus articles. I ran recovact and it seemed to fix the max field, though the min field was wrong where bogus 2, 3, 4... articles had been created. Oh well, too bad. With a reasonable active file, reasonable article numbers, and no history, I fired up C News and it seemed to work okay. The next day, I noticed that /usr/spool was 97% full (it usually runs 60-70% with 14 days) so I tried to run expire, via doexpire. It exited after a few seconds, so I checked errlog. Nothing. It's still empty. Doesn't C News use errlog? I checked for mail (I have it sent to `news') and found a message that said "expire problems". Not terribly informative, that. It seems to be running okay now, I don't know what the problem was, though. But since the old articles weren't in history, I ended up removing them using `find ... -mtime +3 ...'. While I was checking news' mail, I noticed a bunch of messages of the form: From ??? Fri Nov 17 10:44:00 1989 Date: Fri, 17 Nov 89 10:43:55 EST From: root To: news ark1 relaynews `bad/627320593' failed, status 1 Another less-than-totally-helpful message. I haven't been able to figure out what's wrong with these batches or how to get rid of them. Anyone else know? Sometimes the status is 1005. I'm not sure I like the way C News' locking works. I've had several occurrences of processes getting zapped, hung, or suspended, and the lock files don't always go away. I don't know how that could be avoided, but B News didn't have that problem. I was also surprised at first to see articles appearing under soc, talk, and alt. Until I looked at the Newsgroups: lines I thought C News was ignoring my sys file, but these articles were cross-posted. Is there any way to prevent this behavior? With the exceptions of a growing /usr/spool/news/in.coming/bad directory and a growing "news" mailbox, everything seems to be running fine, at last. Oh, did I forget to mention that what little history I had was wiped out when I installed the Nov13 patches? What's a few more duplicates... BTW, what do I have to do to get NNTP to log? I have the following in my conf.h: #define FAKESYSLOG "/usr/lib/news/nntplog" #define FAKEAPPEND #define SYSLOG LOG_LOCAL7 #ifdef SYSLOG /* Define LOG if you want copious logging info */ #undef LOG /* undef it if you don't */ #endif /* but you can only have LOG if you have SYSLOG */ Any help would be appreciated. Configuration: 4.3bsd on VAX 780 C News Nov13 NNTP 1.5.7 Dave Sill (dsill@relay.nswc.navy.mil)