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From: faunt@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM (Doug Faunt)
Newsgroups: net.news.b
Subject: Re: Inews vs. df
Message-ID: <543@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM>
Date: Sat, 9-Aug-86 13:15:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: spar.543
Posted: Sat Aug  9 13:15:09 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 11-Aug-86 02:49:04 EDT
References: <2400@phri.UUCP> <1299@lsuc.UUCP>
Reply-To: faunt@spar.UUCP (Doug Faunt)
Organization: Schlumberger Palo Alto Research - CASLAB
Lines: 23

In article <1299@lsuc.UUCP> dave@lsuc.UUCP (David Sherman) writes:
>
>Aside from keeping /usr/spool on a separate file system from
>/usr/lib, you might consider a simple alternative to expire:
>find(1). I've given up on expire, both because it's slow and
>because it's unreliable (if anything happens to the history file).
>Much simpler, and with few harmful side-effects, is
>	find /usr/spool/news/net -mtime +15 -type f -exec rm {} ';'
>with whatever modifications for directory name and expiry time you like.
>
>The only significant side-effect is that articles with explicit
>long expiry dates will be lost anyway. No big deal, in my opinion.
>A less-significant effect is that, under certain circumstances,
>rn will give you "Skipping unavailable article" messages due to
>the active file being out of sync with the real world.


Michael Ellis, who set up the system here, set up something he calls
"prune" that trims individual directories in a script, so that some
news-groups stay around longer than others.  This is fine, and seems
to work well, BUT our history file is continuously growing.  What do
people think is the best way of getting the history file back in sync
(and smaller)?