Path: utzoo!utstat!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!samsung!uunet!icom!xwkg.Icom.Com!andy From: andy@xwkg.Icom.Com (Andrew H. Marrinson) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: Duplicate articles from B news site - would C news help ?? Message-ID: Date: 25 Nov 90 02:18:43 GMT References: <1990Nov22.175142.18296@zoo.toronto.edu> Sender: news@icom.icom.com (News Feed) Organization: Icom Systems, Inc. Lines: 43 henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes: >In article ianh@bhpmrl.oz.au (Ian Hoyle) writes: >>Since moving to C news in the past week (with the associated monitoring of >>log files to make sure everything is working) I've noticed lots of duplicated >>articles being fed to us from our single, upstream newsfeed... >You shouldn't be getting literally-duplicate articles -- same article twice -- >from any properly functioning news system, B or C. However, beware: there >has been at least one incident recently of a combination of software oddities >causing repeated posting of articles which *looked* similar but were really >different articles, with different message-IDs. There is nothing any news >system can do about that. Can you tell us a little more about this weird combination? We are a leaf site getting our feed only from uunet, and almost have the articles arriving here recently have been rejected as duplicates. We are running C news (with libdbm, not dbz -- is that a problem?). I investigated this further today trying to figure out if it was my problem or someone else's (uunet?). I wrote some scripts that took the message IDs rejected as duplicates from the log file and used gethist to construct a path to those messages. That showed me that the articles did exist on our system. But, if the failure is in the dbm fetch returning the wrong datum for a given key, my technique wouldn't be correct would it! (I WILL go back and try and verify that the key resulting from the dbm fetch matches the one asked for. We have been running news for a while, so it is possible that we are having problems with hash buckets filling up or some such, but Mr. Hoyle said he just installed news so that shouldn't be his problem. I sure would like to get to the bottom of this. Either we are missing about half the articles, or we are paying to transfer twice as much data as we should be. Is anyone else running a leaf site fed by uunet seeing lots of duplicates in their logs? -- Andrew H. Marrinson Icom Systems, Inc. Wheeling, IL, USA (andy@icom.icom.com)