Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site ulysses.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!gatech!ulysses!smb From: smb@ulysses.UUCP (Steven Bellovin) Newsgroups: net.news.group Subject: Re: The Great Net Cleanup Part II Message-ID: <1051@ulysses.UUCP> Date: Fri, 16-Aug-85 16:11:22 EDT Article-I.D.: ulysses.1051 Posted: Fri Aug 16 16:11:22 1985 Date-Received: Mon, 19-Aug-85 08:13:01 EDT References: <696@gatech.CSNET> <697@gatech.CSNET> <813@gatech.CSNET> <9935@ucbvax.ARPA> Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill Lines: 25 > I would have thought that someone would have remarked on this before, > but, apparently not. > > A while back someone said that if there was some fixed limit to the > number of newsgroups, that would justify (in his opinion) removing > dead groups, but otherwise he preferred keeping them. > > Well, big surprise people, there is just such a limit, in every version > of news I have seen (up to, and including 2.10.3). > > The limit is on the number of characters in all the newsgroup > names concatenated together (including separators). On ucbvax > the active file is currently about 60% there already (of the > limit in 2.10.3 - I have a vague memory that the limit was > set smaller in older versions). Just as a case in point, ulysses lost about 12 hours worth of news last night (and I lost a lot of time cleaning up after it) because net.music.guitar blew that limit... Which brings up a suggestion -- would it be that hard for rnews to try a bit harder to keep an article when things have blown up? Say, try saving it in /usr/spool/news/SAVE/dd.hh.pid (which should be unique for the life of the problem)? Maybe even a list of alternate directories to try, site- configurable, for when /usr/spool is out of space or i-nodes.