Articles stuck in /var/spool/news/incoming

[Russ Allbery]

Nigel Telles <ntelles at metrohm.co.uk> writes:

> Going through all the information I have been supplied by the good
> people in this group. I did find that the Five articles that were stuck
> in /var/spool/news/incoming when rnews -U was run in the syslog it
> mentioned 5 Articles were offered and 5 were refused.

That means the server thinks it already has them.

> My question is before I changed the Permissions on the rnews command
> (uucp:news) and it was run as part of the Cron And the error was
> permission denied would the Message IDS have been recorded in the
> History, so when I did change the rnews permissions to news:news as
> suggested and rerun rnews -U I would have got the message 5 Articles
> were offered and 5 were refused ( Because history already new about
> them) .

Right.  But it may mean that they were already posted to the newsgroup as
well (generally INN doesn't add the message ID to history unless it's
actually been stored).

> But in the mean time, has anyone got any advice in a power failure
> situation as to a set of steps that could be taken To test the integrity
> of your News Server, before finding out the Hard Way.

If you're running at least INN 2.4.0, it's reasonably robust against a
power failure and tries to do its own cleanup as it comes back up.  This
problem wasn't a power failure problem; it was a bug in Red Hat's
installation of INN that you wouldn't have had if you'd built INN from
source.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please send questions to the list rather than mailing me directly.
     <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.