news reader cannot see articles

[Jeffrey M. Vinocur]

On Fri, 19 Jan 2007, Howard Yuen wrote:

> We have been using INND 2.4.1 for awhile now and everything seems to
> work fine until recently.  We noticed any newgroup we create now cannot
> be read by newsreader.  The existing newsgroups are working normally.
> We also checked the incoming articles are indeed still properly stored
> within the articles folder (see below) but the newsreader (Outlook
> Express) seems to have problem retrieving them.  The newsreader just
> flash a header count of (16) then disappear, and there is no headers or
> articles retrieved into the newsreader for that newsgroup. 

I think the most likely scenario to exhibit the behavior of
unexpectedly-empty groups is a problem of some kind with the overview
database.  I wouldn't normally expect that to only affect newly created 
groups, though.

Unless...

I bet you're using tradindexed, and that the problem is that INN is unable
to create new directories in the overview tree.  Check the ownership and
permissions carefully and I'll bet you'll find something.

If you have a large overview tree, you may find it useful to do something 
like this:

    find ~news/spool/overview/ -type d | xargs ls -ld

and then scan the results and see if you catch something like the above.  
If I had to guess, I'd say that some of the directories are owned by 
root instead of news.


-- 
Jeffrey M. Vinocur
jeff at litech.org