Xref: utzoo news.software.b:3597 news.software.nntp:424 Path: utzoo!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!ark1!ark1!dsill From: dsill@ark1.nswc.navy.mil (Dave Sill) Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.software.nntp Subject: Re: B/C News woes Message-ID: <1989Nov21.140935.1224@relay.nswc.navy.mil> Date: 21 Nov 89 14:09:35 GMT References: <1989Nov17.162448.22026@relay.nswc.navy.mil> Sender: news@relay.nswc.navy.mil (News) Reply-To: Dave Sill Organization: Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren VA Lines: 126 Second try since nobody responded. I'd really like to know what the problem is with the bad batches; I'm still hetting error messages by mail. In article <1989Nov17.162448.22026@relay.nswc.navy.mil>, dsill@ark1.nswc.navy.mil (Dave Sill) writes: > 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) Dave Sill (dsill@relay.nswc.navy.mil)