Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!steinmetz!ge-dab!codas!pdn!hargen
From: hargen@pdn.UUCP (Bill Hargen)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: USENET restore from backup GOTCHA!
Message-ID: <2380@pdn.UUCP>
Date: 2 Mar 88 17:58:49 GMT
References: <3003@codas.att.com> <14437@oddjob.UChicago.EDU>
Reply-To: hargen@pdn.UUCP (Bill Hargen)
Distribution: news
Organization: Paradyne Corporation, Largo, Florida
Lines: 24

In article <14437@oddjob.UChicago.EDU> matt@oddjob.UChicago.EDU (Mr. nEtural) writes:
>I solved that and related problems here by sticking the lib directory
>under the main news spool directory.  Now it all goes or none if it
>does.  (If it all goes, I fetch it all from a neighboring campus site.)

There is also an advantage to having the spool and lib directories in
separate file systems.  This morning, for the second time in less than
a month, we were bitten by the System V "out of i-nodes" bug.  But since
the lib directory was in a separate file system, the log file contained
the message ID's of the articles that were trashed.  I was able to do a
little editing and create a sendme control message to send to the upstream
site asking for the lost articles.  This sure beats having to contact
someone and ask them to resend all of the last 24 hours of news.

Of course, in this case the info would still have been in the log file
even if it was in the same file system, since it was just out of i-nodes.
But if we had run out of free blocks and spool and lib were in the same
file system, then there would have been no history of what was lost.

-- 
Bill Hargen				Paradyne Corporation
{codas,usfvax2}!pdn!hargen		Mail stop LF-207
Phone: (813) 530-8655			P.O. Box 2826
					Largo, FL  34649-2826