Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!ucbvax!pasteur!ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU!fair
From: fair@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU (Erik E. Fair)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: /usr/spool/news on >1 fs?
Message-ID: <4276@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu>
Date: 6 Jul 88 08:10:17 GMT
References: <161@hawkmoon.MN.ORG>
Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu
Organization: USENET Protocol Police, Western Gateway Division
Lines: 52

News shouldn't trash filesystems like that, but we'll chalk that up to
problems in the UNIX you run. Did you say System V?

Anyway, you have a couple of options, none of them especially pretty.

1. buy bigger disks. 5.25 inch winchesters in the 100's of megabytes
	have been available for quite some time, at continually
	decreasing prices.

2. pester your vendor into supplying you with a disk device driver
	that will make several disks look like one big disk; then
	you can have a filesystem that spans multiple physical disks.
	It's not hard to do one of these, but few vendors I know
	are inclined to do special driver hacks without, ahem,
	financial incentive.

3. Put /usr/spool/news into the biggest partition that you can right
	now, and live with it. If your vendor is at all reasonable,
	s/he will have made it possible for you to make a whole
	disk into a single partition. In fact, really reasonable
	vendors will have written their disk drivers to allow the
	user to have a separate partition table for each disk on
	his system. If you can do this, be very careful, and make
	lots of verified backups, before and after you change your
	disk configurations around.

	Also, bear in mind that netnews traffic has a pretty constant
	flow per day, and except for occasional variations (and,
	of course, the usual slow growth) you can control the amount
	of space netnews uses on your system by twiddling the amount
	of time you keep netnews around (i.e.  by telling expire
	what age articles should be when they're nuked). You might
	also consider cutting back on the number of newsgroups you
	receive; this will allow you keep the remainder longer.

4. Use expire to archive expired netnews into a different partition.
	I've never done this, but I assume that it is possible
	(i.e. netnews will copy articles into the archive partition,
	if a link attempt fails). Note that there is no secondary
	expire on the archive - it will grow without bound, so you'll
	have to do something to keep it from taking over the partition
	you assign to it. Also, none of the netnews user interfaces I
	know of will look at an archive. They all want to see the
	articles in /usr/spool/news (or whatever name you compiled in
	defs.h), and aren't interested in /usr/spool/oldnews (or
	whatever). Interface Writers! This Is An Opportunity!

Welcome to Economics as applied to disk space - the Science of Scarcity.
Time to decide what's really important to you, and what you want to
pay for it.

	Erik E. Fair	ucbvax!fair	fair@ucbarpa.berkeley.edu