Resending articles for previously unwanted newsgroups

[Christoph Biedl]

Maarten Thibaut wrote...

> 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"

... and after that the Message-ID is blocked in the history, therefore ...

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

... fails. Solution for future articles: Set "remembertrash" to false so
you can feed such an article again. Since the archive server has a
single incoming feed only this does not have the usual nasty side
effects.

Now for the articles that are already blocked:

[ snip - I consider messing around in the spool a bad idea anyway ]

> * 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?

That sounds ugly.

> * 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?

You can remove all the articles from the history that do not have a
token. These articles either have been expired or they were rejected for
whatever reason.

For that amnesia procedure try:

cd ~/db
grep -v '@$' history >history.n
makedbz
# point of no return
mv history.n history
mv history.dir.n history.dir
mv history.hash.n history.hash
mv history.index.n history.index

Beware: innd should be throttled, better be stopped during the entire
operation. 

As a test, you can do grep and makedbz thing first during operation and
check whether they take an acceptable amount of time, should take less
than news.daily. And of course, backup all history files before doing
real changes.

    Christoph