Problem with history

[Andy Hawkins]

Resent because I have a suspicion it didn't work last time. Apologies if you
receive this twice.

> Hi,
>
> I recently started having problems with news.daily running on
> my installation of INN on Debian Stable (the version in the
> banner is 'InterNetNews server INN 2.4.3 (20050407 prerelease)'
>
> I started getting the following messages in my news.daily report:
>
> expire begin Tue Dec  6 04:18:25 GMT 2005: (-v1)
>     expire: dbzsync: putcore failed
>     expire: dbzinit: dbzinit already called once
>     expire: can't dbzinit /var/lib/news/history Success
>     expire: dbz: fseeko failure in putconf: Bad file descriptor
>     /usr/lib/news/bin/news.daily: line 1: 15001 Segmentation
> fault      expire
> +-v1
>
> The server was left paused after the run.
>
> I have tried cleaning out all the articles and overview data,
> and rebuilding my history file using
>
> su news -c "/usr/lib/news/bin/makehistory -O -T /tmp"
>
> After this, I end up with the following history files:
>
> -rw-r--r--  1 news news        0 Dec  8 10:04 history
> -rw-r--r--  1 news news       43 Dec  8 10:04 history.dir
> -rw-r--r--  1 news news 60000000 Dec  8 10:04 history.hash
> -rw-r--r--  1 news news 40000000 Dec  8 10:04 history.index
>
> However, if I do a 'du' on the files, I get:
>
> gently:/var/lib/news# du -h history*
> 0       history
> 1.0K    history.dir
> 0       history.hash
> 0       history.index
>
> Why are the history.hash and history.index files so big in
> the 'ls' output, but 'du' shows them not using any space? Is
> this related to the expire failing?
>
> Thanks for any advice.
>
> Andy
>