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