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From: jeh@simpact.com
Newsgroups: news.software.anu-news
Subject: Troubles adding batches with 5.9B
Message-ID: <791.2588fa61@simpact.com>
Date: 15 Dec 89 21:06:24 GMT
Organization: Simpact Associates, San Diego CA
Lines: 49

We are running NEWS 5.9B.  

Last night a large number of articles that arrived in "rnews" format were
rejected by the add/network command, with messages of the form

	Add <id> news.group: JUNK (Cannot open output file (write access))
or
	Add <id> junk: REJECT (Cannot open output file (write access))

(We'll call these "type 1 errors".)  	
First there was just one article in one batch; another batch or two
arrived okay, then nearly an entire batch was rejected.  For each article,
an item number was assigned and a newsgroup directory entry was created, but
attempts to read the item fail with "unable to access item text", or some
such.  

A later batch was rejected with about 400 (the number of items in the 
batch?) messages that read

	Error:  Cannot open scratchfile SYS$SCRATCH:ADD_139B.ITM

(We'll call these "type 2 errors".)  	
A few hours later, another batch arrived and worked fine, except for one
item that was posted to comp.unix.wizards and rejected (Type 1).  It turns
out that although there's an entry in news.groups for comp.unix.wizards,
the directory doesn't exist.  Apparently, in this case, NEWS trusts news.groups
and doesn't try to create the directory if it isn't there.  

However, this was NOT the case with the previous (very numerous) "type 1"
errors; the directories did exist.  Not only that, but I logged into the
newsmgr account and did one of the adds "by hand", and it worked fine. 

Does anyone have any idea of what is going on?  (Yes, the current (only)
version of NEWS.EXE is installed with sysprv, and the newsmgr account has
sysprv as well.)

Suggestions:  1. Add an interpretation of the error status return from 
file open attempts.  These messages would be a lot more helpful if 
accompanied by "no privilege for attempted operation" or "no such device"
or whatever.  2. All error messages should have some sort of indicator in
them to distinguish them from all the other output from an ADD BATCH.  I'd
like to have the once-a-night NEWSSKIM do a SEARCH of the previous day's
ADD BATCH log files looking for error messages, and mail the result to
the news manager.  

	--- Jamie Hanrahan, Simpact Associates, San Diego CA
Chair, VMSnet [DECUS uucp] and Internals Working Groups, DECUS VAX Systems SIG 
Internet:  jeh@simpact.com, or if that fails, jeh@crash.cts.com
Uucp:  ...{crash,scubed,decwrl}!simpact!jeh