History problems, probably chained

[Zenon Panoussis]

I am trying to cancel some messages and failing. As I go
along, I run into more errors.

   ctlinnd cancel "msg-id"

returns Ok, but the messages are still on the server and
available to the readers after news.daily has run.

After various fiddling and searching exercises I tried
Scott Russel's recipe from 11/16/2001 on this list and
did

su - news
ctlinnd throttle "Messed history."
cd /var/lib/news
rm -f history*
touch history
makedbz -i
mv history.n.dir history.dir
mv history.n.hash history.hash
mv history.n.index history.index
rm -rf /var/spool/news/overview/*
makehistory -a -O -b -e
ctlinnd go "Messed history."
news.daily notdaily

This created a whole new history and overview and returned
a dozen entries like

   Duplicate message-id "[0CD4F78301AD8F31A7ABD7F6F6C89B1D]" in history

in the news.daily report. Repeating the whole procedure
got me nowhere except when, for some reason, I started
getting messages like this instead:

   expire begin Sun Jun 13 19:14:32 CEST 2004: (-v1)
       Can't reserve server
       Article lines processed        0

Restarting the server completely doesn't change this,
news.daily still can't reserve it. And when that problem
goes away, I guess I'll be back at the duplicate messages
being in expire's way.

This is where I'm stuck. Does anyone see the obvious
that I'm missing?

The server is 2.3.5 installed from the RHEL 3.0 RPM
and running with tradindex on RHEL 3.0.

Z