Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: How to temporarilly turn off a news feed using C news
Message-ID: <1989Nov21.174513.3290@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1989Nov20.160329.7715@phri.nyu.edu>
Date: Tue, 21 Nov 89 17:45:13 GMT

In article <1989Nov20.160329.7715@phri.nyu.edu> roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes:
>	One of the sites I feed news to has asked me to turn off news for a
>little while because his /usr/spool is too full.  What's the best way to do
>that?  I just put a line in /usr/lib/news/batchparms with 0 for the third
>field (queue length).  Was this the right thing to do? 

This will work, sort of -- it will suspend batching to him, but will continue
to queue up the names of news articles.  I.e., he'll have a big backlog when
you re-enable batching, although many of the articles will have expired.
(This can be a problem because the current batcher has trouble dealing with
this sort of situation efficiently.)  You haven't really turned off the feed
to him, just postponed it.

>What I used to do
>in cases like this under B news was to edit the sys file, but that's always
>a mess so I don't like to play with it any more than I have to.

I think that's still the preferred way to do the job.  What I do in such
cases is comment out the sysfile line, which makes it easy to put it back
later.
-- 
A bit of tolerance is worth a  |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
megabyte of flaming.           | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu