Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!nbires!hao!boulder!sunybcs!rutgers!bellcore!faline!ulysses!gatech!rayssd!dhb From: dhb@rayssd.RAY.COM (David H. Brierley) Newsgroups: news.admin,news.sysadmin,news.groups Subject: Re: "One Day Expire" on some news groups - help, I'm only a user Message-ID: <1584@rayssd.RAY.COM> Date: Wed, 23-Sep-87 12:40:25 EDT Article-I.D.: rayssd.1584 Posted: Wed Sep 23 12:40:25 1987 Date-Received: Sat, 26-Sep-87 06:06:44 EDT References: <521@parcvax.Xerox.COM> Sender: dhb@rayssd.RAY.COM (David H. Brierley @ Raytheon Company, Portsmouth RI) Reply-To: dhb@rayssd.RAY.COM (David H. Brierley) Organization: Raytheon Company, Portsmouth RI Lines: 31 Keywords: articles still in directories Xref: mnetor news.admin:1036 news.sysadmin:367 news.groups:1571 In article <521@parcvax.Xerox.COM> burton@parcvax.Xerox.COM (Philip M. Burton) writes: ... >A *few* newsgroups seem to have a "one day" expire. Most groups are fine. >Now, the articles in question are all still in the spool files, and I can >always read them there using cat or more. (Pain!!!) But, one of the >groups in question, comp.sys.ibm.pc, is one of my favorites. > This sounds very similar to a problem I had on one of our HP workstations. It seems that when expire is all done expiring articles it then attempts to rebuild the "active" file. Rather than keeping track of what it has expired as it went along, it does this by going to each directory in the spool area and reading it. If it finds a directory that it can't read it simply updates the active file to indicate that there are no articles available. The question is, why couldn't it read the directory. On our HP system it turned out that the directory reading code that was supplied with news 2.11 didn't work and all I had to do was convince the makefile that the system had the directory routines in the standard library. In you case it might be that expire isn't running setuid to news or that the directory permissions are wrong. Also, check to make sure you aren't running more than one expire with different options. -- David H. Brierley Raytheon Submarine Signal Division 1847 West Main Road Portsmouth, RI 02871 Phone: (401)-847-8000 x4073 Internet: dhb@rayssd.ray.com Uucp: {cbosgd, gatech, linus, mirror, necntc, uiucdcs} !rayssd!dhb