Xref: utzoo news.software.b:3617 news.software.nntp:427 Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.software.nntp Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: B/C News woes Message-ID: <1989Nov22.195438.4460@utzoo.uucp> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology References: <1989Nov17.162448.22026@relay.nswc.navy.mil> Date: Wed, 22 Nov 89 19:54:38 GMT In article <1989Nov17.162448.22026@relay.nswc.navy.mil> Dave Sill writes: >`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. Sigh. It's very difficult to deal with arbitrary-length lines unless you're willing to write all your own code and ignore existing tools. The parts of C News that are written in C are pretty much free of limits on line length, but awk and such do have trouble in extreme cases. >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? Relaynews does. Several of the other programs report trouble by mail rather than via errlog. I'm not entirely sure this is the right approach, but it's what's currently done. Reporting via mail does have the advantage that it never runs into permission problems. >I checked for mail (I have it sent >to `news') and found a message that said "expire problems". Not >terribly informative, that... Unless something is severely wrong in your system, it should have been accompanied by a more specific complaint. That message never gets sent (by doexpire) unless there is something else to send. Could your mailer be fouling things up? >While I was checking news' mail, I noticed a bunch of messages of the >form: >... > ark1 relaynews `bad/627320593' failed, status 1 > >Another less-than-totally-helpful message... Unless you are running an out-of-date C News or have serious problems with file ownerships/permissions, such a report should always be accompanied by more specific messages in errlog. >... I haven't been able to >figure out what's wrong with these batches or how to get rid of them. First you need to track down a more specific problem report; then you need to take that and go look at the batches (in in.coming/bad) and find out what's wrong with them. >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. It paid the price in other problems. There is *no* portable locking method that dependably removes locks when a process drops dead. And the failure of a locking mechanism is usually a symptom of more severe problems, generally justifying human attention rather than blind removal of the lock. >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? Is there a reason why these groups are in your active file when you don't want to receive them? Take them out and C News will stop filing articles under them. Or change the fourth field of the active-file lines to "x" and C News won't even put the articles in "junk". -- 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