Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site packet.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!seismo!hao!hplabs!hpda!fortune!amd70!packet!cfv From: cfv@packet.UUCP Newsgroups: net.news Subject: history and expirations Message-ID: <246@packet.UUCP> Date: Tue, 21-Jun-83 20:07:13 EDT Article-I.D.: packet.246 Posted: Tue Jun 21 20:07:13 1983 Date-Received: Thu, 23-Jun-83 19:40:28 EDT Organization: PacketCable,Inc. Cupertino, CA. Lines: 40 A couple of things to ponder: I muffed the setuid bit the afternoon after I made my comment that expire probably should be setuid to news. Result: when expire ran that night, the history files became owned by root. When the news came in after that, inews couldn't touch those files, and so history didn't update. I am set up so that /usr/lib/news, and usr/spool/{news,oldnews} are writeable only by the news account. I assume I am not the only person who has to do this (as an aside, if expire isn't setuid to news, anything archived in oldnews by a crontab process becomes owned by root, not news. This might be a problem at some sites, I don't know). Anyway, in future releases expire should probably be [chown news expire; chmod 4700 expire] in the Makefile to keep this from happening. It does bring up an interesting problem though: my history file is now out of date, and so I am goin to have to (eventually) expire those articles that came in by hand or figure out how to get them into history. Assuming that this problem has occurred at least once before, has someone solved this and has a program they want to donate to the cause, or at least a hint? Second, a strange thought: Has anyone given any thought to the possibility of keeping track of the users and what they have seen and expiring a message after everyone has seen it? This might cut down rather significantly of the filesystem requirements for news, and it would keep me from having to manually keep track of our users .newsrc files (my spool file is a little tight for space temporarily, so I have been expiring select topics early to keep things from overflowing until I can expand it. If expire was smart enough to get rid of it when my system was done with it, it would save me some time). It seems to me that what you would have to do is map all of the messages and then check each .newsrc for the list of read messages. Any message that has not been read is removed from the map, and when all of the .newsrc files are read, anything left in the map can be removed. Special dispensation for 'Expires:' messages would have to be made as well, I guess, but this might make the history file obsolete. Any comments? -- >From the dungeons of the Warlock: Chuck Von Rospach ucbvax!amd70!packet!cfv (chuqui@mit-mc) <- obsolete!