Whole buncha d-u-m-b questions

[Heath Kehoe]

[...]
>
>Which, well, that too seems to have gotten hung up at the same time
>the overview data appeared to stop being written:
>
>news     19168  0.0  0.1 1480 1016 pts/2    S 18:20:11  0:00 db_archive -a
>news     19318  0.0  0.1 1480 1016 pts/2    T 21:14:27  0:00 db_archive -a
>
>So I don/t think I'll be seeing any output from the db_archive
>that I started myself.  Hmmm.
>

I'll bet you have a stale lock that everything is deadlocking on.
That can be caused if something that was accessing the database
crashed (or otherwise exited uncleanly) and left a lock behind.

You can clean it up with the following:
 1) kill off all news processes (with kill -KILL if necessary)
 2) su news -c "ovdb_recover -f" 
 3) su news -c rc.news


-h