🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan7.170102.1835@dunix.drake.edu> ta2321s@dunix.drake.edu (Terry Asher alias -       The Penguin) writes:
>    The first error is in root's mail which reads as follows:
>      leading five sites sending stale/future/misdated news:
>      249 news.iastate.edu
>The number above changes constantly; going up and down.

Terry,
 
If you look at the manual page for relaynews - c-news/man/relaynews.8:
          -o causes articles with dates
          (in Date: headers) more than days old to be dropped (usually
          to stop accidentally-retransmitted old articles).
 
If you look at the script input/newsrun you'll see where it picks up the value
for a variable called 'stale' - and passed it to relaynews. newsrun is what's
actually started by cron to do the posting in incoming news.
 
The variable 'stale' is set by calling a script 'staleness' in
c-news/relay/aux/staleness. It takes the value from the /expired/ line in
/usr/lib/news/explist and returns that... the /expired/ line is therefore used
to see if an article it too old - in addition to determining how many days
only lines in /usr/lib/news/history are kept for killing duplicate articles.

It doesn't seen that anything in c-news/man actually says where the value
for determining stale news comes from... might be a useful addition if it
wasn't that I just overlooked it.

-rh

-- 
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