Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!deimos!mccall!tp
From: tp@mccall.uucp
Newsgroups: news.software.anu-news
Subject: Re: Troubles posting news (V5.8)
Message-ID: <2158.25d9254a@mccall.uucp>
Date: 14 Feb 90 09:30:49 GMT
References: <938.25d8183f@simpact.com>
Organization: The McCall Pattern Co., Manhattan, KS, USA
Lines: 40

> I can POST to local newsgroups fine, but when I try to Post to a sci. group,
> for example, I get the message:
> Error: Post - (sci.physics) Cannot add to Newsitem index file (B00184EC)

I had a similar problem in v5.7. I don't know if the error code was the
same or not. Also, all incoming news (i.e. Add Batch commands) generated a
REJECT message for almost every article. It actually degraded slowly,
starting in one group and sporadically spreading. About 3/4 of my groups
were not accepting news by the time I noticed it. (It just happened that
the groups I read most were hit last, or maybe that is significant).

Anyway, the only solution that worked for me was to delete the news.items
file and rebuild it. Unfortunately, doing this takes 36-48 hours of real
(wall clock) time or more, depending on how much news you have, and all
articles look new (i.e. the will all show up as unread).

Someone posted a program that would do this quicker, but as luck would have
it, that is one of the articles that was rejected!

Anyway, if you want to do this (Friday afternoon, preferably before a 3 day
weekend!), the operative command is:

NEWS> add file/delete news_device:[*...]*.itm

I don't recall doing anything other than just deleting news.items and doing
the above command, but you might look in the installation instructions in
the section on running news for the first time to see if there is any other
preparation to do.

If you need to rebuild news.groups as well (I didn't), I suppose you could
delete it and add the /cregrp qualifier to the above command. Beware that
it will create some bogus groups because of cross-posting, but those can
always be deleted later.

Hopefully, you won't have to resort to this, but it did solve my problem. I
have no idea what the actual cause is/was.
-- 
Terry Poot (800)255-2762, in Kansas (913)776-4041
The McCall Pattern Company, 615 McCall Rd., Manhattan, KS 66502, USA
UUCP: rutgers!ksuvax1!mccall!tp   Internet: tp%mccall@ksuvax1.cis.ksu.edu