INN Weirdness

[Jeffrey M. Vinocur]

[ This is a bit long because I don't know if any of it is relevant, but
the interesting bit is at the very end. ]


I'm not very hopeful, but I'm sufficiently confused to try asking if
anyone else has seen anything like this.

I've got a small server, with a 2 GB partition for ~news/spool/.  It
managed to fill up the other day when somebody flooded one of the groups I
carry with binary, and INN throttled itself.  Since overview is also on
that partition, it got corrupted (or at least out of sync), and so I
rebuilt history and overview from the spool after clearing out some space.

All good, restart server, continue.

Just a little while I go INN throttled itself complaining of lack of disk
space:

  Jun 13 18:49:51 marduk innd: SERVER throttle No space left on device
  writing SMstore file -- throttling

but `df` shows there is still a fair amount of space remaining.  On a
hunch, I unmount the spool partition and fsck it, but there's no evidence
of imminent drive failure.  At this point, since I've got it unmounted, I
move everything except articles/ off of the spool/ partition and remount
it so that ~news/spool/articles is the only thin gon the separate
partition.  Then I try makehistory -F -O, and partway through it starts
spouting

makehistory: Can't write overview data "@0500000002B1000057C90000000000000000@"
makehistory: Can't write overview data "@0500000002B1000057CA0000000000000000@"
makehistory: Can't write overview data "@0500000002B1000057CB0000000000000000@"
makehistory: Can't write overview data "@0500000002B1000057CC0000000000000000@"

and filling the logs _fast_.  Here are the first couple entries:

  Jun 13 22:06:43 marduk makehistory[10390]: tradindexed: repacking group
  comp.lang.java.help, offset 314
  Jun 13 22:06:43 marduk makehistory[10390]: tradindexed: packgroup cant
  write to
  /usr/local/news/spool/overview/c/l/j/h/comp.lang.java.help-NEW.IDX: No
  such file or directory
  Jun 13 22:06:44 marduk makehistory[10390]: tradindexed: repacking group
  comp.lang.python, offset 7908
  Jun 13 22:06:44 marduk makehistory[10390]: tradindexed: packgroup cant
  write to /usr/local/news/spool/overview/c/l/p/comp.lang.python-NEW.IDX:
  No such file or directory

although if it's complaining about the files listed above, they do exist
and are timestamped as if makehistory had just written to them.

I don't understand why we throttled with disk space to spare, but as a
more pressing concern, what do the above messages mean?


-- 
Jeffrey M. Vinocur
jeff at litech.org