retrieving expired messages

[Wim Lewis]

On Wednesday, May 1, 2002, at 10:59  AM, Bill Tangren wrote:
> I am running inn 2.3.2-5, and I had left the expire settings, on one of
> my newsgroups, set to the default, and what I wanted was for them not to
> expire at all. I have made the requisite changes to expire.ctl, and I
> have the expired messages on backup tape. How do I retrieve them? I
> think that renumbering and history file are the big problems. Any ideas
> how to do this, or where to read up on how to do it?

Are you using tradspool? I don't think renumbering is a problem; INN 
doesn't tend to reuse article numbers. (That would confuse most news 
clients.) You should be able to restore the article files to the spool 
directory, adjust the group's low article number in 'active', and 
rebuild the overview database. (I don't know if rebuilding history is 
also necessary.) See the man page for makehistory(8) (which also does 
the overview databases).

Wim.