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From: robbinj@molihp.UUCP (Robbin W Johnson)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Expire corrupts active file (2.11 news)
Message-ID: <250@molihp.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 27-Nov-86 21:33:28 EST
Article-I.D.: molihp.250
Posted: Thu Nov 27 21:33:28 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 30-Nov-86 19:39:44 EST
Reply-To: robbinj@molihp.UUCP (Robbin W Johnson)
Organization: Moli Energy Ltd., Burnaby, BC, CANADA
Lines: 85

First the configuration:

Hardware: Hewlett Packard HP9000/550 (1 CPU + 4MB Ram + 404 MB Disk)
Software: HP-UX release 5.11 (SYS V rel 2.2 + BSD enhancements)
          2.11 news - patchlevel 0

The problem:

Expire is called nightly by the cron entry:

	30 1 * * * exec /usr/lib/news/expire

After it has run, the LIBDIR/active file is broken.  The minimum article
number and maximum article number are both equal in value and set to what
should be the value of the maximum article.  That is if the directory
SPOOLDIR/news/software/b (as an example, this applies to ALL newsgroups)
contains articles 1 through 10, both the minimum and maximum article numbers
in LIBDIR/active are set to 10.  None of the articles are older than 2 weeks.
The value of DFLTEXP in defs.h is 2*WEEKS.  The value of HISTEXP is 4*weeks.
I did no hand customizing of defs.h outside of localize.sh (I have appended
the contents of localize.sh below).  If I don't run expire, active is not
corrupted.

What gives?

I cannot run expire while this is going on.  If I do so then anyone reading
the news sees one and only one article unread and all the others that may
be in the spool directories invisible.

I have to run expire since we are limited in the amount of disk storage
availible for the netnews.

If anyone has had a similiar problem I would appreciate pointers/advise on
solving this.  I have looked at expire.c and have a couple of ideas since all
the playing with active is in one area, but I am unfamiliar with the algorithm
and cannot spend a lot of time on this for the next couple of weeks.

WHAT HAVE I DONE WRONG?

Please reply by mail and I will post a summary to this group if anything
obviously wrong or HP(-UX) sensitive appears.

Thank-you,
Robbin.

...!ubc-vision!van-bc!molihp!robbinj

---This is the contents of my localize.sh---
rm -f Makefile
cp Makefile.dst Makefile
chmod u+w Makefile
ed - Makefile  <<'EOF'
/^UUXFLAGS/s/-r -z/-r -z -n/
g/^#USG /s///
g/^#V7 /d
g/^#VMS /d
g/^#BSD4_[123] /d
g/^VFORK/s/=-Dvfork=fork/ =/
g/^LFLAGS/s/-i //
g/termlib/s//curses/
w
q
EOF
rm -f defs.h
cp defs.dist defs.h
chmod u+w defs.h
ed - defs.h <<'EOF'
/ROOTID/s/10/3/
/N_UMASK/s/000/022/
/TMAIL/s;^;/\* ;
/PAGE/s;/usr/ucb/more;/bin/more;
/UXMIT/s;^;/\* ;
/NONEWGROUPS/s;/\* ;;
/INTERNET/s;/\* ;;
/GHNAME/s;/\* ;;
/DOXREFS/s;/\* ;;
/ALWAYSALIAS/s;/\* ;;
/SENDMAIL/s;/\* ;;
/HIDDENNET/s;frooz;moli;
/MYORG/s/Frobozz Inc., St. Louis/Moli Energy Ltd., Burnaby, BC, CANADA/
/NICENESS/s;/\* ;;
/ORGDISTRIB/s;froozum;moli;
w
q
EOF