Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!cornell!rochester!bbn!uwmcsd1!dogie!uwvax!dave@spool.cs.wisc.edu
From: dave@spool.cs.wisc.edu (Dave Cohrs)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: How long are you keeping news these days?
Message-ID: <4979@spool.cs.wisc.edu>
Date: 8 Jan 88 16:12:47 GMT
References: <3899@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Sender: news@spool.cs.wisc.edu
Reply-To: dave@spool.cs.wisc.edu (Dave Cohrs)
Organization: U of Wisconsin CS Dept
Lines: 33

We currently spool news on three sites in the UW Comp Sci dept.
This should decrease to two sometime soon, one for the research
machines (spool.cs.wisc.edu) and one for the other machines
(puff.cs.wisc.edu).  Other machines access the news via either
NNTP or NFS (for a few machines).

Spool receives all the standard newsgroups, as well as the inet, alt,
and unix-pc distributions.  It keeps news for two weeks.  We keep news
on the "h" partition of an old SI (fuji) 160 drive.  That's about 100
Meg.  Both the news itself and the news/lib are kept here; uucp, et al,
are kept on another partition.  Since moving to this filesystem, I
haven't had any problems running out of either inodes or blocks.  We
also archive a few newsgroups on the same partition as uucp.

Puff has a smaller news partition, only 48 Meg.  We keep news there
for 8 days, down from 9 as of November.  The inodes get rather
scarce there occasionally, but it hasn't overrun yet.

We expire nightly, an old habit picked up when our news partitions
were smaller and shared space with other spool directories; this is
still necessary on puff.  I get a little status report in the mail
every morning giving me the current news disk usage and uucp
queues on these machines.

The biggest problem I've had with disk space lately is nntpd's getting
stuck for a day (or two) with 3 Meg of history file open.  After a
couple of these are stuck, the news partition really seems to be
filling up.  Killing them off frees up the space.  If this gets
bothersome, I'll probably have to put timeout code into the nntpd.

Dave Cohrs
+1 608 262-6617                        UW-Madison Computer Sciences Department
dave@cs.wisc.edu                 ...!{harvard,ihnp4,rutgers,ucbvax}!uwvax!dave