File exists writing SMstore problem

[Wim Lewis]

I had the same problem. It went away after I upgraded to a newer release 
of INN, but I also changed a few things.

As far as I could tell, the root of the problem was that the overview 
and/or active files were getting screwed up. The "high" number in active 
was too low, which meant that when the storage manager tried to store a 
new article, it would try to give it a filename of a file which already 
existed, and fail. I could briefly fix the problem just by fixing the 
numbers in 'active' with a perl script, but something would soon reset 
it back to the bogus value. I had to rebuild the history and overview 
databases to get INN to run long enough to accept the next batch. (I 
didn't have to delete the spool --- the spool itself appeared to be 
fine, but the history and overview database is completely opaque to me 
and I couldn't tell if, or in what way, it was corrupted.)

This happened several times, but I could never figure out quite what was 
going on or what caused it.

After upgrading, I also changed to a different overview database method, 
so I don't know whether the upgrade or that change or something else 
caused the problem to go away.

For the spool itself I'm using a combination of tradspool (for groups 
I'm archiving) and CNFS (for groups I want to expire). I haven't had 
problems that were traceable to the spool method, just the overview 
method.


Wim.