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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