History problems, probably chained

[Zenon Panoussis]

Jeffrey M. Vinocur wrote:

>>    ctlinnd cancel "msg-id"

> If that's seriously what you typed, I expect your problem is that the 
> msg-id had some $ characters in it, and your shell tried to expand them as 
> variables inside double-quotes ("").  Always use single-quotes ('') for 
> Message-IDs.

That is sorta what I typed, but I was cancelling 9000
articles. Few of them would have had expandable characters
in the message-id but all of them were left on the server.
I say "were" because my soup has gotten weirder since.

>>    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. 

> But the server otherwise works?  What does `ctlinnd mode` show? Is there
> anything in the logs corresponding to when expire fails to reserve?

The server works and is receiving streams as it should.
The logs give no additional clue. expire.log has the
same message as the news.notice mail, says only "can't
reserve sercver". At the same point in time, news.notice
says "innd: SERVER server mode throttled" and then notes
the unthrottling and normal operation that followed.
news.err and news.crit say nothing at all.

>> And when that problem
>> goes away, I guess I'll be back at the duplicate messages
>> being in expire's way.

> Those duplicate messages are not a problem.

In the meanwhile, the nightly news.daily, which has
worked fine for months on end, has run from cron, and
now all 1.000.000+ postings on the server appear to be
gone in the readers, except for those that arrived
after the last news.daily run. Physically they're
still in the spool alright, but suddenly the active
file has (highmark-lowmark=1) on all newsgroups
except those that received new articles.

If I were to start completely fresh with a populated
spool and nothing else, is the following procedure
adequate to create history, overview and a correct
active? Anything missing? Should I zero the counts in
active too or should I leave them alone?

su - news
ctlinnd throttle "Messed history."
rm -rf /var/spool/news/overview/*
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

BTW, expire.ctl says /remember/:0 and has done so all
along. I've changed nothing in my configuration files
for months.

Needless to say, I greatly appreciate all help, hints
and ideas, even when they don't include ready-served
solutions ;)

Z


-- 
Dilettantism i en skön konst må ej utdömas. Den bereder en
oskyldig och förädlande njutning både åt utövaren och hans
omgivning. Och idkar dilettanten sin konst med anspråkslöshet
och hängivenhet, så bidrager han till att göra både sig själv
och sina vänner mera mottagliga för konsten i högre mening.

           Gustaf Cederschiöld, Om ordlekar, Norstedt 1910