Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site allegra.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mp
From: mp@allegra.UUCP (Mark Plotnick)
Newsgroups: net.news.sa
Subject: Re: Are there problems if expire runs while news is being received?
Message-ID: <5443@allegra.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 24-Nov-85 21:05:27 EST
Article-I.D.: allegra.5443
Posted: Sun Nov 24 21:05:27 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 25-Nov-85 07:21:02 EST
References: <186@pluto.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill
Lines: 15

The way we avoid the problem here is:
- don't run expire (it would take 11 hours of real time!), and
use find instead.  Once a week, manually turn off uuxqts, trim
down the history file so it only holds 3 weeks' worth of info, and run
"rebuilddbm" (an extract of the rebuilddbm() routine in expire) to
recreate the .dir and .pag files.
- add locking code around dbm accesses.  This is mainly to prevent
problems with concurrent rnews's (either because we have multiple
uuxqt's going at once or have benevolent gremlins who dig into the uucp
spool directory and run unbatch manually).  I just mimicked the article
locking code, and provided an abort() routine for dbm to call that logs
the data from the offending page (so far, it's never been called).  I
also modified libdbm not to cache pages (this change may also help
sendmail out when it's repeatedly hunting for the '@' in an incomplete
alias file).  Modified news code upon request, but it's for 2.10.1.