move articles to another server

[Jeffrey M. Vinocur]

On Oct 25, 2005, at 12:25 PM, Eugeny N Dzhurinsky wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 22, 2005 at 02:50:56PM +0200, Toon van der Pas wrote:
>
>> - Restore the article database and the corresponding active,
>>   active.times and newsgroups files to the new server.
>
> hmm, how? I just have "articles" archive, nothing more...

That's unfortunate.


> may be there is some script which could read recursive tree and  
> create groups
> records in active file?

Well, if you know what should be in your active file (e.g. the full  
group list from isc.org, or whatever), you can use that.  If not,  
you'll have to come up with an active file somehow (see below.  You  
can live without active.times and newsgroups, though, and if the  
numbers in the active file are wrong you can fix that with ctlinnd  
renumber after you've rebuilt overview.

A first stab at creating an active file can be done from the articles  
tree, but there are a couple subtle issues to keep in mind.  (1) Any  
group that was in your active file but never had any articles posted  
to it will not exist on disk at all, so you can't reconstruct it.   
(2) There's no way to distinguish a hierarchy component that  
shouldn't be turned into a group (like comp.lang.perl, which is a  
prefix for other groups, but not one itself) from one that should  
(like alt.cellular, that is a prefix as well as a freestanding  
group).  (3) You can't easily tell moderated groups from unmoderated  
groups.

You could handle #2 by erring on the side of making extra groups, or  
having real groups go missing, it's kinda up to you.  Something like

find . -type d | sed -e 's at ./@@' -e 's@/@. at g' -e 's/$/ 0000000000  
0000000001 y/'

would get you way more groups that you want, but you could slim it  
down.  Or take the tack of only using groups that have articles in  
them, or that have articles or are leaves, or...


-- 
Jeffrey M. Vinocur
jeff at litech.org