Path: utzoo!utstat!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde!uunet!mcsun!ukc!warwick!expya!admin From: admin@cs.exeter.ac.uk (Khalid Sattar) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: expire extention idea Message-ID: Date: 5 Dec 89 10:05:19 GMT References: <9208@microsoft.UUCP> <247@fortytwo.UUCP> Sender: admin@cs.exeter.ac.uk Organization: Computer Science Dept. - University of Exeter. UK Lines: 38 In-reply-to: tim@fortytwo.UUCP's message of 4 Dec 89 13:52:14 GMT >>>>> In article <247@fortytwo.UUCP>, tim@fortytwo.UUCP (Tim Baker) writes: Tim> It would also be nice if rnews would stop if there is no more room on the Tim> spool directory. If there is not enough space, rnews just keeps spitting Tim> out error messages and trashes all the news it is trying to process. Tim> This may only occur with sites with space limitations, but it would be Tim> a nice feature for us. We have solved this problem only recenlty. I found a useful undocumented feature of expire. If you specify -X to expire it will not run "rnews -U" (we spool all incomming news). Then I have a small script (perl - but it should be easy enough to write one with shell and awk) that checks for free space and calls one batched file at a time using rnews -S... until all batch files have been unbatched or the amount of space on spool is less that desired. Below is header of that script. We have been running it for past 6 days and its working very well. # This script will unbatch the news checking for free disk, the time # and the maximum number of files to unbatch. # # Options: # -f n keep n kbytes free on the spool # -m n only unbatch a maximum of n batch files # -i ignore time - ie do it in working hours too # -n No execute mode - what will happen without happening PS: We also have another script that will only call another site for news if there is sufficient space and once the trasnfer is in progress, further invocations (via cron) checks if there is a call in progress if it is then checks the disk and kills the connection if necessary. -- Khalid Sattar JANET : admin@uk.ac.exeter.cs Computer Science Dept. UUCP : admin@expya.uucp University of Exeter BITNET : admin%uk.ac.exeter.cs@ukacrl Exeter, UK. Tel : +44 392 264062