overview rebuild problem

[Marco d'Itri]

Some weeks ago I've built a new server for the purpose of storing the
it.* hierarchy forever. It has expire never:never:never for everything
but test and control groups, uses timehash, tradindexed and storage
class based expiring. xrefslave is true.
It gets a feed from my regular spool server and I fed it with innxmit
all the articles stored on my old 2.2 server, everything since January.

The problem is that when testing it a coworker discovered there are no
overview records for older articles. These articles are really in the
spool and in the history, because I can request them by Message-ID and
both nnrpd and grephistory know about them.

I shut down the server and I tried rebuilding the overview database with:

makehistory -F -O -x -l 25000 -I -T /tmp

but even if the new database is bigger than the old one:

root at newsserver:pts/7:/news/archive/spool#du -s old-overview/ overview/
121380  old-overview
578848  overview
root at newsserver:pts/7:/news/archive/spool#

there are still missing articles in the overview, and it's not as big as
I think it should be (history has 4202469 entries).

I sampled some random groups and determined that in the overview database
most groups have no entries for articles older than 11 or 14 Jul (I have
found a group with entries for 4 Jul), which is about the date I've built
the server.
I double checked by poking into the .DAT files with less and I can
confirm that the older articles are really missing.

I haven't run news.daily since rebuilding the overview, I'll try
tonight.

The old and new servers have different names, and the first field of the
Xref headers is different in old and new articles, can this be the cause
of the problem? (I don't think it is, because I've seen in the overview
articles with the old hostname).

I really don't know what to look at, I don't understand why makehistory
ignores old articles.

-- 
ciao,
Marco