Restore news posts?

[Russ Allbery]

Nicholas Webb <nickw at uidaho.edu> writes:

> I have a user who is complaining that posts to his list pre 1/27/2003
> just vanished the other day.  It coincides with an improper shutdown of
> inn last week.  I have ran makehistory, which found some missing
> articles, but not the ones in this particular newsgroup.  All posts
> since 1/27 are just fine . . .

> I've looked at the news buffer, and sure enough the articles are gone.
> I do have a backup of the news buffer with the articles, but how can I
> import them without getting rid of the new articles?

By news buffer, should I take that to mean that you're using CNFS?

The INN CNFS code prior to INN 2.3.4 didn't flush its buffers properly,
meaning that articles were sometimes not committed to disk.  This should
be significantly improved in INN 2.3.4 and later.

> Also, out of desperation, I have tried to post the recovered articles
> with 'mailpost' but I get the error (I have the text of the posts):

> 441 435 Duplicate (Article not posted.)

The article is still noted in history, but not in CNFS.

You *can* stop the server, remove the relevant lines from the history file
(you can find them with grephistory on the message ID), run makedbz to
rebuild the indices, and then restart the server and you'll be able to
post them, but easier would probably be to just change the message IDs of
the messages and repost them with mailpost.

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

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