Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!ima!cfisun!lakart!dg
From: dg@lakart.UUCP (David Goodenough)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Auto-expiration of news
Message-ID: <341@lakart.UUCP>
Date: 25 Nov 88 03:49:05 GMT
References: <1066@psuhcx.psu.edu>
Organization: Lakart Corporation, Newton, MA
Lines: 34

From article <1066@psuhcx.psu.edu>, by wcf@psuhcx (Bill Fenner):
> Does anyone have a good way to expire news automatically when the news
> partition gets full?  We only have a 25 meg partition for news, and it
> often manages to fill up on weekends, and it's a big pain to come in
> to find a console log 5 inches thick with logs of /usr/spool/news: write
> failed, filesystem full.

Lets see. I use the following shell script line to expire news on a daily
basis:

find /usr/spool/news -mtime +7 -type f -exec rm \{\} \; 2>&1 >/dev/null

and the following on a weekly basis to prevent the history file from
oozing all over /usr:

expire -e 7 -i -r

Now write an awk script (or a C program) that takes a look at the
output from df, to see how crammed your news partition is, and adjust
the '-mtime +7' bitty in the find command as appropriate (i.e. +5 if
the partition is getting full, and +7 or more if it's empty)

The find / expire combination is recommended to any sysadmins who are
really getting fed up of running an hour long expire a night. If you
set the expire to happen on Sunday morning (say at 9:00), you can
let it take forever, and it won't dent the system quite as bad. Of course
you may need to pick your time carefully if you're something like ncoast /
killer / portal, cause those folks may be on line and active all the
time. Still it's a suggestion .....
-- 
	dg@lakart.UUCP - David Goodenough		+---+
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