Recovering local articles that are not visible

[Nick Giles]

Russ Allbery wrote:
> Nick Giles <nick.giles at ontology.com> writes:
> 
>> I'm trying to recover some articles which have been lost by our
>> installation of inn. Our server is an internal only setup, so just a few
>> local groups. We had a power cut a couple of days ago, and now one of
>> the groups is reporting 'Bad article number' for all its (old)
>> articles. I've had a poke around, and the articles are in the 'articles'
>> folder area, and there are entries in the overview .DAT file that
>> correspond. The 'active' file had its maxindex reset to 001, when it
>> should have been 009 (yeah, not a huge group...)
> 
> This is exactly the problem that tdx-util -R is designed to solve.  For
> the groups affected, you want to follow the recipe in the tdx-util man
> page under EXAMPLES:
> 
>        Rebuild the overview information for example.test from a
>        traditional spool directory:
> 
>            tdx-util -R <patharticles in inn.conf>/example/test -n example.test
> 
>        The last command may be useful for recovering from a bad crash or
>        corrupted overview information for a particular group, if you are
>        also using the tradspool article storage method.
> 
> You should then run ctlinnd renumber <group> to update your active file
> based on the newly rebuilt overview information.  You should be able to do
> this while the server is running.
> 

That did seem to be the tool that kept coming up, thanks for that. The 
issue now is that we've got inn 2.3.5, which lacks tdx-util. I can't 
upgrade the application itself at the moment, but I've tried using a 
locally built copy of 2.4.6 to do the repair. I've fed it a copy of 
inn.conf that the innupgrade script fixed up, and tdx-util will now run 
and report details of some of the groups, however the -R option results 
in an empty overview file. The articles are still in the filesystem, but 
  I'm a little concerned about the comment "the name of the file must 
match the article number of the article" in the tdx-util man page. The 
articles directory doesn't look like that. For instance one of the 
missing articles is in:

articles/time-00/61/85/0510-4bba

with headers:

Message-ID: <hjs0jq$hmp$1 at HOST>
Xref: HOST NEWSGROUP:5

Is there any way to repair this without upgrading?

Thanks,

Nick