Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Cnews: Shouldn't expire lock out relaynews?
Message-ID: <1989Dec1.040818.26587@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <GNB.89Nov30133423@baby.bby.oz>
Date: Fri, 1 Dec 89 04:08:18 GMT

In article <GNB.89Nov30133423@baby.bby.oz> gnb@bby.oz (Gregory N. Bond) writes:
>... cron fired off newsrun which kicked off relaynews on the 6 or so
>batches waiting in in.coming.  _While expire was running_.  So now I
>think I have a corrupt history file...

Relaynews running while expire is running is normal, believe it or not.
The crucial observation is that relaynews only *appends* to the history
file.  When expire hits EOF, *then* it locks the news system (waiting,
if necessary, until something else releases the lock), and tries to
read more in case there was more.  When it hits EOF the second time,
that's definitely it.  This lets relaynews run freely for most of the
expire run, but still guarantees consistency.

>line in the log file appears in both history and history.o, but
>neither history.dir or history.pag...

How are you looking it up in history.{dir,pag}?  Those are *not* text
files, and a grep won't find anything sensible in them.  Try doing the
lookup using "newshist" (see newsaux(8)); if it finds it, then the dbm
files are correct.
-- 
Mars can wait:  we've barely   |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
started exploring the Moon.    | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
