Resending articles for previously unwanted newsgroups

[Maarten Thibaut]

Hi,

[newbie alert]

We have a setup where an archive host receives all news groups from the 
main news server. When we want to start archiving a new group, articles 
already presented to the archive before we added the group cannot easily 
be added to the archive:

Dec 25 18:42:21.751 - localhost <pipLf.467696$Zk6.434192 at news.example.com> 437 Unwanted newsgroup "example.test"

I've tried:

* Resending the articles already presented to the archive using ihave. 
Problem is, the server replies with 'Duplicate'.

* Copying the article onto the tradspool. Problem here is that clients 
won't see the article because it's not in overview, even if low and high 
watermarks are fine. The server replies with '423 Bad article number' when 
using "group example.test" and "article <number>".

* Running tdx-util on articles not in the overview fails because the 
history file doesn't contain the message id.

* Running ctlinnd addhist for every article is slow and insecure, it 
requires the update scripts run by the webserver to get passwordless sudo 
privileges for ctlinnd.

* Running makehistory to fix the problem is slow (250*10^6 articles, 
750gig, a downtime of several days every time a group is added).

We're using tradspool and the overview is tradindexed. Is there a better 
way to accomplish adding groups? Perhaps we should:

* Write a program to manage the history DB directy and insert lists of 
entries so we can run tdx-util after adding the group and copying the 
articles onto the spool?

* Write a different program to remove or expire the 'unwanted newsgroup' 
data from history so the articles can be presented to the server using 
ihave again?

Thanks in advance for any help!

maarten