enableoverview to false

[Julien ÉLIE]

Hi John,

> On June 11, I edited inn.conf on one auxiliary transit server to:
> 
> enableoverview:	false
> noreader:       true
> 
> Now I see in the Daily Report something which is unnecessary (see boldfaced lines):
> 
> *expireover: enableoverview is not true*
> *expireover: can't open overview database*
> Expire messages:
> expire begin Thu Jun 14 00:05:56 CDT 2012: (-v1 -z/var/log/news/expire.rm)
>      Article lines processed   368148
>      Articles retained         271952
>      Entries expired            96196
> expire end Thu Jun 14 00:06:50 CDT 2012
> all done Thu Jun 14 00:06:50 CDT 2012
> *expireover start Thu Jun 14 00:06:51 CDT 2012*
> *expireover end Thu Jun 14 00:06:53 CDT 2012*
> lowmarkrenumber begin Thu Jun 14 00:06:53 CDT 2012: (/var/log/news/expire.lowmark)
> lowmarkrenumber end Thu Jun 14 00:06:53 CDT 2012
> 
> This doesn't hurt anything, but it is rather odd to see it.
> 
> What then would makehistory do if it was ran?
> 
> Then I'd probably need to edit /etc/cron.d/inn to remove "expireover"
> as shown below:
> 
> ---0 0 * * * news test -x /usr/lib/news/bin/news.daily && news.daily expireover lowmark delayrm
> +++0 0 * * * news test -x /usr/lib/news/bin/news.daily && news.daily lowmark delayrm

Exactly.
If you disable the use of overview in inn.conf, you should not run news.daily
with the "expireover" keyword.  Removing this keyword is fine.



> Is this a minor bug that was forgotten because few users configure their enableoverview like I did?

I do not believe it is a bug.
Running news.daily with the "expireover" keyword means that expireover
is supposed to be run.
Your daily report mentions that fact:  expireover started and ended two seconds
afterwards.  It reported that enableoverview was false and that it couldn't
open your overview database.

I think that's fine.  If other people reckon that the behaviour should
be different (no log at all for expireover in that case?), please speak up.



> Now, can I reclaim the disk space used by overview by deleting the complete /var/spool/news/overview directory?

I believe that's fine.
Just to be sure, move /var/spool/news/overview to /var/spool/news/overviewOLD and
restart INN.  Wait a few days before removing the directory.



> If I remove it, would that cause a problem with expireover? Oddly it is reporting above that it can't find the overview database.

You should remove the keyword from the news.daily cron line.



> What about removing the associated files in /usr/lib/news/bin such as:
> 
> expireover
> ovdb_init
> ovdb_monitor
> ovdb_server
> ovdb_stat
> overchan

As these programs are no longer used, they can be removed.
Yet, you will not gain much space!

-- 
Julien ÉLIE

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  (Aristophane)