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From: davy@intrepid.erg.sri.com (David Curry)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: C News isn't creating incoming newsgroups
Message-ID: <1991Apr26.153108.1557@erg.sri.com>
Date: 26 Apr 91 15:31:08 GMT
Sender: news@erg.sri.com
Reply-To: davy@erg.sri.com
Organization: SRI International, Menlo Park, CA
Lines: 37

Perhaps this has been asked before; if so, my apologies.

I'm running C News (patch date 7-Sep-1990) and NNTP 1.5.10 on a Sun-4/380
under SunOS 4.1.

For several months, everything worked fine, and I didn't have to touch
anything (which makes me really like C News).

But about a month or so ago, it seems that automatic newsgroup creation
broke.  I know that numerous groups have been created, but none of them
have shown up on our system.  (Not even the "daily" creation of bogus
"alt" groups.)  I modified the "newgroup" script in the newsbin/ctl
directory to send me a note whenever it got invoked, and it hasn't
sent me anything.  When I create a group by hand (using "addgroup"),
it seems to work just fine.

The only clue I have is that every night I receive an empty mail message
from the news system.  It seems to come from the "doexpire" based on the
header times, but I have been unable to track down exactly what script is
generating it.  I still receive the "leading unknown groups" mail from
"doexpire", about 15 minutes later than the empty message.  The only
other current oddness is that there's a line in the history file that
is making expire mad; I plan to try to delete this by hand, since it
doesn't seem to *ever* go away.

For the most part, I haven't touched anything in the news system to cause
things to break.  So I'm at a loss to even know where to start looking.
I've tried checking permissions, ownerships, etc. and haven't been able
to find anything obviously wrong.

Before I reinstall the entire world, does anyone have any idea what might
be wrong here?  Even half-assed guesses about things to look for would be
welcome at this stage.  Even "stupid" things to check are welcome.

Thanks,
Dave Curry
davy@erg.sri.com