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From: KSpagnol@massey.ac.nz (Ken Spagnolo)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: c-news expire problem and questions
Message-ID: <1104@massey.ac.nz>
Date: 26 Oct 90 04:38:21 GMT
Reply-To: K.Spagnolo@massey.ac.nz (Ken Spagnolo)
Organization: Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
Lines: 49

(Sorry if this has been discussed recently.)

We're dealing with Ultrix 4.0 here, with the Sep. 7 patch
of c-news and nntp-1.5.10 (though that shouldn't matter).
When my disk fills to the point where nntp stops accepting
new batches, expire also stops expiring.  This has happened
twice.  The first time, it started up again on its own a
few days later and I don't remember any details, but the
second time it went for a whole week not expiring anything.
Throughout the week, I received expire's verbose output
thru the mail as so:

expire problems:
22820 kept, 0 expired
0 residual lines
0 links archived, 0 junked, 0 missing

except that the residual line count went from about 11000
to 0.  First question:  What are residual lines?
This made me believe that expire didn't have any disk
space problems.  I archive news to a different partition
and have modified spacefor so that it has no problems
letting expire get on with it (enough room for the new
history files and expired articles, etc.).  I also tried
the -g option to report funny dates and rebuilt the
history file from scratch.  But nothing worked until I
removed by hand several Mb of articles (no one reads news
from this machine yet, so I can play around a bit).  After
another history rebuild, expire started working again.  So
it seems the partion was too full even though spacefor was
happy?  (Unfortunately, /usr/spool/news is not a separate
partition on my system, in case you're wondering.)  I
removed 25 Mb before trying again, so I don't really know
what the magic number would be, if it really is a space
problem.  What other factors are invloved with expiring
articles that I don't know about?  When expiring, is
spacefor called to report on available space in any other
areas than control and archive?  I wouldn't think expire
would go all the way thru and look at each article (or at
least count them) if space was the problem.  My usual expire
command reads as follows:  doexpire -v -a /expiredir

I appreciate any tips and will post the winning solution
for others.

-- 
Ken Spagnolo - Systems Programmer, Postmaster, Usenet Administrator, etc.
   Computer Centre, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
K.Spagnolo@massey.ac.nz  Phone: +64-63-69099 x8587  New Zealand = GMT+12