strange behavior with articles numbers after a rebuild of the overview using 2.3.3

[Christoph Biedl]

Lisa Ungar wrote...

> Christoph,
> Yes, I am interested in preserving the spool and would like the 
> instructions.

Two approaches. The first should be easier to understand but takes more
hardware and probably also more time. I did both serveral times and
prefer the latter.


1.
Set up a "backup" INN on another machine. Disable overview, clone the
active file. Then you can do the "Feed all articles on a server to
another server" as in http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/inn.html#S6.4
from your server to backup. Purge the server, then feed again in the
opposite direction.

2.
Instead of feeding another server you can write the spool into "batches"
using the batcher program and feed them in afterwards using rnews.
However it's a bad idea to write a single huge batch file, therefore
you'll have to split the list of article tokens into several smaller
ones.

(I assume bash and gnu-tools)

# load INN variables to ease portability. Adjust to your configuration.
. lib/innshellvars
# define a temporary directory. Must have enough space to hold all the
# batch files. This directory should be empty.
export TMP=/tmp

# get list of article tokens from history.
grep '\@$' $PATHDB/history | awk -F"\t" '{print $3}' > $TMP/tokens

# split token list into files of 10000 each, this should create
# batch files of about 25MB size.
split --lines=10000 $TMP/tokens $TMP/part.
#                                        ^ this dot is important!

# create batch files
for token in $TMP/part.* ; do
    serial=`basename $token | sed -e 's/part\.//'`
    echo $serial
    batcher backup.$serial -b0 <$token >$TMP/batch.$serial
done

# now your spool has been saved.

# recovery
for batch in $TMP/batch.* ; do
    echo $batch
    rnews -v $batch
done

# done, clean $TMP



General remarks:
It's a wise idea to set xrefslave: true during the transmissions. This
will leave the article numbers intact and your readers won't notice the
operation once your done.
And: Don't forget "ctlinnd param c 0" before feeding in. I don't
remember how often I forgot this :-)


Good luck!

    Christoph