Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!ucsd!ames!amdcad!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!hp4nl!botter!balaena!wezel
From: wezel@balaena.UUCP (Jos C. van Wezel)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: expire: EXPIRE!!
Message-ID: <451@balaena.UUCP>
Date: 19 Aug 88 10:13:40 GMT
Organization: Biology Dept., Free Univ.,Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Lines: 39

Followup-To: 
Distribution: world
Organization: Biology Dept., Free Univ., Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
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A question to the community,

I have News (2.11B) up and running for about three months now, but a
irritating misbehaviour keeps popping up. When I try to expire with
a crontab like:
		 /<libdir>/expire -e 7 -E 8
nothing happens, at least no expiration of articles. Sometimes the 
message "Cannot get/set lockfile" is logged, but every permission
is OK and the only cause I can think of is that expire was started
while inews was still busy (some downloads take a while). Furthermore
the history file does NOT seem to be touched, after an expire run.

Until now I did the following manually to retrieve my i-nodes
( since nothing expires, things tend to pile up):

expire -r -I -e 7
expire -n all

This releaved the disks eventually, but I never used it overnight because
of the unexpected and long time it takes to run.

My question therefore is: what does expire need to expire or what could have
gone wrong setting up the News.

I'm running SysV 3.1 with News 2.11B p14.

Thanks for any suggestions.


Jos van Wezel

wezel@bio.vu.nl
.....mcvax\!botter\!balaena\!wezel