Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!amdahl!pyramid!prls!philabs!micomvax!vedge!lai
From: lai@vedge.UUCP (David Lai)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: history file missing (dbm store failed)
Message-ID: <298@vedge.UUCP>
Date: 2 May 88 19:19:06 GMT
Organization: Visual Edge Software, St. Laurent, Quebec
Lines: 38

I am running patchlevel 14 of 2.11.  The problem I have is that
expire logs (into /usr/lib/news/log) the message 'dbm store failed'.  This
occurs if the store() call returns an error.  Apparantly this causes the
history file to be deleted.

Then afterwards, incoming news causes the mail to be sent to usenet:

	history file missing... the problem has been taken care of.

Well, what it means by "taking care" of the problem is creating a fresh new
history file, thus the new history
file (created) contains incorrect info (ie. all old history lost).  I also
suspect that the .dir and .pag files are no longer in sync with the
new history file.

BTW, cron run's expire daily with flags
	-e 10 -E 30
to keep filespace down, but keep history of 1 month.

What is the problem?  It it a problem with dbm?  My dbm manual page says:

 "All key/content pairs that hash together must fit on a single block.
 Store will return an error in the event that a disk block fills with
 inseparable data".

Does this mean that my history file is too large for
dbm to handle?  I also suspect that too many entries are placed in one
slot (of the hashing function) overflowing the (what I beleive to be
ridiculous) internal dbm limit of 1 disk block.

Has anyone else noticed this problem?  Any fixes?  I really hate to do
an 'expire -r' every few days (which is about how often the above
problem occurs) to rebuild the history file.  I haven't tried the recently
posted 'dbz' replacement of dbm optimized for news.  Does anyone know if
dbz will solve my problem?
-- 
	"What is a DJ if he can't scratch?"  - Uncle Jamms Army
The views expressed are those of the author, and not of Visual Edge, nor Usenet.
David Lai (vedge!lai@larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu || ...watmath!onfcanim!vedge!lai)