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From: kamat@uceng.uc.edu (Govind N. Kamat)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,comp.sys.hp
Subject: problems with News expire on HP 9000/840
Keywords: expire problem hp
Message-ID: <124@uceng.uc.edu>
Date: 8 Aug 88 03:46:12 GMT
Organization: Univ. of Cincinnati, College of Engg.
Lines: 43


I have been having problems with News 2.11.14 ever since I 
installed it on our HP 9000/840 running HP-UX (HP's version 
of System V with Berkeley enhancements).  The problems are 
mainly with expire.

If new articles come in when expire is running, they get 
spooled into /usr/spool/news/.rnews, to be unspooled later
by "rnews -U" which is invoked automatically when expire is 
done.  But rnews does not seem to be able to extract the
filenames of the spooled files correctly, and I get error
messages like:

inews: freopen (*part of filename here*): No such file or directory
inews: rnews failed, status 256.  Batch saved in /usr/spool/news/*same name*

Rnews loops, giving the same bunch of messages again and again,
until I kill it.  Nothing is saved in /usr/spool/news/ in spite
of what the error messages say.

In fact, even if I delete all the files in .rnews and then 
invoke "rnews -U", it still grabs identical garbage filenames
from the directory-file .rnews, and the same problem re-occurs.

Another problem is that the rebuild history-file option of
expire seems to truncate the history file to an empty file.
The earliest article numbers in the active file get rotated
to the latest, although the articles themselves are not
deleted.  Although we are System V, HP has provided dbm,
and I am using that.

Lastly, the l and L commands of vnews which are supposed to
list articles in a newsgroup don't give any output.

Since the Netnews software seems to be running fine on most
machines, these problems could be something specific to the
HP 9000 series.  If someone out in netland has fixes or 
information about either problem, I'll really appreciate 
hearing about it.  Thanks in advance.

--
Govind N. Kamat
University of Cincinnati
kamat@uceng.uc.edu [129.137.33.1]