Re: NEWS server

Dale E. Reed Jr. ( (no email) )
Wed, 19 Mar 1997 13:28:39 -0800

Jeff Woods wrote:
>
> I've seen this on INS, Netscape, DNews, and Netmanage IFS. It cannot be
> avoided, it seems, when running news on NT. It happens to us about every
> other month or so. Our solution has been to RENAME AUTOCHK.EXE so that it
> doesn't auto-rebuild, leaving the cross-linked files present. EVENTUALLY
> (a couple months MORE later) this will cause you to have to respool (delete
> the spool partition and reformat it), but that's better than leaving your
> news servers down for two days while it rebuilds a hash table of two
> million entries.

We use to run Real Audio on the same Alpha box DNES runs on. RA would
crash the machine a lot (this is the older version). DNEWS NEVER
required
anything to restart. I have never had to go through this with DNEWS.
It seems
that DNews knows how to overcome and/or automatically do the recovery.
INS
just "stops". You have to run nntpbld yourself. Thats not acceptable.

> In fact, we're right in the middle of doing that today -- it finally got to
> the point that it wouldn't run, so we had to delete and respool. Since we
> still have the ACTIVE file, no users have lost news -- they just can't
> access it for the time it takes to delete the spool partition and reformat
> it (and with RAID, 30 gigs formats in about 2 minutes), and they can't read
> any articles that have already arrived.

We have two drives striped, and haven't had to do the above with DNEWS.
Not
that we have a full feed, only about 8,000 groups.

-- Dale E. Reed Jr.  (daler@iea.com)_________________________________________________________________       IEA Software, Inc.      |  RadiusNT, Emerald, and NT FAQs Internet Solutions for Today  |    http://www.emerald.iea.com