From: ellis@nova.gmi.edu (Stew Ellis)
Subject: Re: my nnmaster won't collect articles anymore, help!!!
Organization: GMI Engineering&Management Institute, Flint, MI
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1992 17:30:23 GMT

cos@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu (Ofer Inbar) writes:

>vander@nssdca.gsfc.nasa.gov (John R. Vanderpool (NASA/GSFC/STX)) writes:
>>it doesnt' want to collect articles anymore - i'm using 6.4.16 with
>>connection to a NNTP site - see Logs below - it apparantly had a little
>>trouble late last week connecting to the NNTP host but that was just
>>a net problem that has since been resolved but that's about when all the
>>trouble began
>>
>>nnadmin stat sez:
>>Master:
>>initialized:   Apr 27 09:44
>>last_scan:     Sep  3 16:18		# today is Sep 9 !! -fish
>>last_size:     63544
>>no of groups:  1574
>>	    
>>
>>Articles:   12561
>>Disk usage: 426 k
>>		  
>>Blocked groups: 1368			# this jumped to 1368 after some
>>					# of my nnadmin attempts -fish
>>Ignored groups:  33

>  I was just about to post a problem we're having, when I noticed that
>someone else appears to be having exactly the same problem.  About
>three days ago, there were a few "giving up on NNTP server" entries in
>the log, and then nnadmin went on a mad spurt of removing newsgroups,
>several hundred of them, all of which were marked IGNORED.  It then
>refused to continue collecting any articles.
>  Over the past few days, I've repeatedly killed and restarted the
>nnmaster.  I've even rebuilt the GROUPs file and initialized the
>database twice.  Each time, nnadmin collects happily for a while, and
>then it just stops for no apparent reason.  I tried running with -t or
>-D, but got no indication of why it suddenly stopped collecting.
>(Incidentally, running nnmaster -t and then tail -f Log lets you see
>the same display as nnmaster -D).

>  A bit of history...
>  We've been running nn6.4 ever since pl14 was out, and updated to
>pl16 when that appeared.  It's been running on an HP9000/850 HPUX 8.0,
>reading news of a remote NNTP server.  Never any problems.
>  Just over a week before the problems started, we got an HP9000/750
>(also HP-UX 8.0), and recompiled the nnmaster to run on that machine.
>The 750's disks are NFS mounted to the 850, and both machines have an
>nn client sharing the database on the 750.  These two machines are
>upward binary compatible, btw.  Things ran flawlessly for a week, then
>it blew up.

>Any ideas?

>  --  Cos (Ofer Inbar)  --  cos@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu
>  --  WBRS (BRiS)  --  WBRS@binah.cc.brandeis.edu  WBRS@brandeis.bitnet
> Brandeis University Computer Science Department         (617) 736-2700
> 415 South Street, Waltham MA, 02254-9110        System Admin: 736-2717

I had a problem like this about three months ago, and someone else told me
about a bug involving headers with binary characters in them.  He said he
just went in and edited the offending header and things went alright.  Since
I am building indexes over NNTP and do not have access to the article
database, I could not do that.  I was able to determine looking in
nn_data/DATA at the time stamps which group was causing the blowup.  I then
killed and restarted nnmaster -r \!comp.sys.amiga "".  I edited the startup
line in /etc/rc.local, so we are still not receiving indexes on that group.
I suppose I will go back and change it and try again, but the site I read
indexes from keeps articles a VERY long time.

--
--                                                        ___________________
  R.Stewart(Stew) Ellis, Assoc.Prof., (Off)313-762-9765  /   _____  ______ 
  Humanities & Social Science,  GMI Eng.& Mgmt. Inst.   /        / /  /  / /
  Flint, MI 48504      ellis@nova.gmi.edu              /________/ /  /  / /
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