Acbosgd.1956
net.news.b
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ihnss!cbosg!cbosgd!mark
Sat Jan 16 00:12:10 1982
the first B news crash
Well, it's happened, folks, a B news system has gotten clobbered.
I don't know exactly what happened but I'll tell what I do know
and what I did to fix it. Fortunately, nothing was lost.
The system was cbosg, an 11/70. One morning, people were coming to
me saying that readnews was complaining about too many newsgroups.
Our limit was set at 100 and active had 113 lines. I edited it and
fed it through sort, and in addition to the usual junk, there were
several newsgroups that appeared 2 or even 3 times. (This might
be accounted for by someone manually deleting directories and not
taking things out of active, I don't know.) So I cleaned out the
active file and forgot about it. (I read my news on cbosgd myself,
so I wouldn't notice weirdness.)
Next morning was the flood of stuff from the arpa gateway that had
been backed up for a week. I got lots of stuff on cbosgd (but I
had to quit in the middle of reading it, so I didn't notice that
some newsgroups were missing.) A couple of people asked me why
there was so little news that morning. I didn't think anything of it.
Next day I get caught up on news and still no unix-wizards. I check
cbosgd and find nothing has been coming in for a week. So I check
cbosg and discover that about 80% of the . files are gone! There was
quite a bit of news in the spool dirs (much more than had made it
to cbosgd) but I don't know how much, if any, is missing.
So anyway, here is how one reconstructs news when the . files go away,
or the active file is munged:
su
cd /usr/spool/news
rmdir * # get rid of old empty dirs
rm -f .* # rebuild all the . files
for i in *
do
echo $i
x=`ls $i | sort -n | tail -1`
echo $x articles
dd if=/etc/passwd of=.$i bs=1 count=$x
done
ls > /usr/lib/news/active
This is from memory and is not exactly what I did. I forgot to remove
the empty directories, so many of the $x's were the null string - this
gave me all of /etc/passwd in the . file, which took forever to copy
at one byte per write. Note that only the size of the . file matters,
I used /etc/passwd simply because it was big enough and handy.
Mark
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