Validate history file contents.

[Mikhail V. Golubev]

Hello.

 > On our text-only server we currently keep aprox 90 days of articles ..
 > at the moment our history file size is aprox 6.1Gb with a 1.1Gb .index
 > file.

Which overview storage method are you use? Tradindexed?
Are you sure, that all articles older than 90 days are deleted from spool
(~news/spool/articles/)?
Check settings in ~news/etc/expire.ctl
Check crontab of user news, crontab must contain daily running command:
/usr/local/news/bin/news.daily expireover lowmark delayrm  

 > Is there any way to 'validate' the contents of the history file ...
 > too see if it doesn't contain entries of articles that are no
 > longer on the spool

Try this...
First stop INN:
# su news -c "/usr/local/news/bin/rc.news stop"

Then delete this files (save them somewhere before for backup):
~news/spool/overview/      (all files in this dir)
~news/db/history
~news/db/history.dir
~news/db/history.hash
~news/db/history.index

And then rebuild your history and overview database:
# su news -c "/usr/local/news/bin/makehistory -O -F"

Rebuilding takes much time. You can get a cup off coffee in this time :)

After successful rebuilding start INN:
# su news -c "/usr/local/news/bin/rc.news start"


P.S. sorry for my english

-- 
Best regards,
 Mikhail                          mailto:mvgolubev at gmail.com