Problems starting inn

[Sylvain Robitaille]

On Mon, 26 Sep 2005, Iain Conochie wrote:

>      I am having an issue starting inn. I see this in the news.crit
> error log
>
> Sep 26 14:55:12 pop-news innd: [ID 801587 news.crit] SERVER can't close
> history /data/news/db/history: File too large

This seems like a very similar situation to the one I ran into a couple
of weeks ago with the stats file.  I'm going to quote most of one of the
responses I received about that one, because I'm quite certain that it
will be applicable to your situation as well:

From: list-inn-workers at news.cistron.nl ("Miquel van Smoorenburg" )
Subject:  Re: write(...) to stats file: -1 EFBIG (File too large)
Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 16:23:25 +0000 (UTC)
Message-ID: <dgerht$q84$1 at news.cistron.nl>
To: inn-workers at isc.org

...

Your software needs to be recompiled though to take advantage
of the LFS (large file) interface; for inn this means running
"configure" with the --enable-largefiles option.

Note that this does change the history file format as well.
I'm not sure about overview/storage. So its not a drop-in upgrade
or replacement.

Mike.

---------- end quote ----------

> After some net searching it seems that the history file is a list of all
> news articles the server has dealt with, and is used for spotting
> looping messages (among other things). Will it be OK for be to blow this
> file away and start the server i.e.
>
> cat /dev/null > /data/news/db/history

You'll get duplicate articles if you do that, unless you rebuild the
history file from your current spool.  I haven't yet looked into the
details of doing that for my own system, so I can't give you details
about it, but the makehistory(8) manual page is where I intend to (and
recommend you) start.

> Or will inn then _really_ start to complain? Is there any way of
> limiting how long the history file is kept for?

See the "remember" setting in expire.ctl(5).

I hope that helps ...

-- 
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Sylvain Robitaille                              syl at alcor.concordia.ca

Systems analyst / Newsmaster                      Concordia University
Instructional & Information Technology        Montreal, Quebec, Canada
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