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From: mark@cbosgd.ATT.COM (Mark Horton)
Newsgroups: net.news.adm
Subject: active file is silent on overflow
Message-ID: <2748@cbosgd.ATT.COM>
Date: Mon, 13-Oct-86 10:05:06 EDT
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.2748
Posted: Mon Oct 13 10:05:06 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 14-Oct-86 05:11:50 EDT
Expires: Tue, 31-Mar-87 00:00:00 EDT
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Columbus, Oh
Lines: 36

I just got mail from a news adm who had planned on doing the rmgroups
all at once.  He got burned because his active file overflowed.
There was no warning message, so all his news fell on the floor silently.

There are two limits in the active file: AFSIZ limits the number of bytes
in the active file, and LINES limits the number of newsgroups.  You're
likely to overflow AFSIZ first, and you could easily be reaching it soon.

One of the reasons we're doing the newgroups and rmgroups gradually is
so we won't have a double sized active file.  If you do rmgroups manually
and don't do them as they come in, you'll almost certainly overflow.

The rmgroups for talk groups have already gone out.  soc rmgroups go out
next month.  sci and misc will go out in December.  And so on.

This is a good time to clean out your active file, while you're at it.
Erik Fair sent around a hundred or so rmgroups for old dead names that
he found in .newsrc files on ucbvax.  If you got mail from your system
about them, you still have them in your active file.

If you don't have the rmgroup shell script, the critical resource is
the /usr/lib/news/active file itself, you can manually edit the lines
out.  You might as well remove the directories under /usr/spool/news,
too, but this won't bother news.

It might not be a bad idea to increase AFSIZ in defs.h to 20000, if
you're worried about your active file overflowing.  It will certainly
get bigger before it gets smaller.  comp and rec are large classes,
and next month's we'll probably newgroup the rec groups and rmgroup
the old soc groups (soc and talk have relatively few groups.)

For anyone whose active file just overflowed, you might not see this
message.  If you hear of a problem with your neighbor, you might want
to pass this message along, in case it's the problem.

	Mark Horton