Is anyone executing Cnews on microport 2.4 ?

[Jeff Mann]

In article <773 at micropen> dave at micropen (David F. Carlson) writes:
>In article <14 at pfm.UUCP>, root at pfm.UUCP (TSOS of PFM) writes:
>> trouble with the "spacefor" - the whole time inews says that there
>> is not enough space at my /usr/spool/news (32 MB free space !).
>
>Often news fails with out of space messages if the inode table is full.
...
>The only *real* fix is to upgrade or to mkfs.  Fsck fixes are only temporary.

Another  posting  also  suggested  making  the  raw disk readable, not a
particularly good idea for security  reasons  I  would  think.   Drastic
measures for a simple problem; it is probably just that "spacefor" needs
a  little  customising  to  handle the uport df command.  First you must
change the arguments to df for incoming, articles, etc.  to only specify
the  filesystem,  i.e.   /usr,  instead  of   the   path   names,   i.e.
/usr/spool/news,  etc.   Secondly,  change the awk statement to read awk
"BEGIN { nf = 3 ; nr = 1 }       ( nr to equal one instead of two).

David  is  correct  to  point out that the "infamous" indode problem can
happen with Microport.  I think a preventative fix for this would be  to
add a line:

	> $NEWSARTS/tmp$$; rm $NEWSARTS/tmp$$

to  newsrun,  just before the test for request to stop in the main loop,
for example.  This will stop the creation of thousands of files  without
a  deletion  of a file; which I believe is the condition that causes the
missing inodes.  Comments?

Also  of  interest to Microport users: batch/viauux calls uux with a -gd
option, not recognised by uport.  Just take it  out.   Related  is  that
conf/queuelen,  either  version,  does  not work.  I used the 'old uucp'
version, and removed the part about changing directories.  The length of
the $site should be reduced from 7 characters to 6 (remove one  ?   from
the  case  statement,  and  one  .  from the expr statement.  The $grade
should (I think) be changed from d to AD.

Now let's see if this article makes it to the net with my new C news! :-)


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| Jeff Mann - Inter/Access, Toronto           ...uunet!mnetor!intacc!mann  |
| "A picture is worth 256 thousand words"  {utzoo, utgpu}!chp!intacc!mann  |