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From: dave@lsuc.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Expiration dates on OtherRealms
Message-ID: <1958@lsuc.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 30-Jul-87 02:23:04 EDT
Article-I.D.: lsuc.1958
Posted: Thu Jul 30 02:23:04 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 1-Aug-87 05:36:45 EDT
References: <2525@hoptoad.uucp> <2821@phri.UUCP>
Reply-To: dave@lsuc.UUCP (David Sherman)
Organization: Law Society of Upper Canada, Toronto
Lines: 28
Summary: public notification is all that's needed

Whether or not one believes Chuq should be using long expiry
dates (I personally see no problem, having read his explanations),
this discussion has revealed one point: the fact that the long
expiries weren't being brought to anyone's attention until
John posted his article.

Obviously, any sysadmin who wishes to override a group's
expiries can easily do so. Perhaps what's needed is a utility,
available for all sysadmins to have run once a week or
whenever, that would provide details of currently pending
extended expiries.  Number of articles per group and total
size involved should be provided.  Sample output

Group			>14 days	Total size
rec.mag.otherrealms	5		132K
comp.unix.wizards	2		  6K

etc., with a total figure at the bottom. This could be
written easily enough in sh+awk or C; if anyone cares
to write it, I'm sure lots of news admins will use it
to monitor any potential abuse of the Expires: header.
In its most primitive form, this program is merely
find /usr/spool/news -mtime +15 -type f -exec ls -s {} ';'

David Sherman
Toronto
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