🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm a relatively new news administrator here, and I think I've more
than got my hands full.  We're running the performance release of C
news and NNTP 1.6.11.  The daily newswatch reports come back to me
sometimes saying that relaynews can't find /usr/lib/news/active: no
such file or directory.  But it DOES exist!  Furthermore, it considers
unknown a number of newsgroups which *have* been created, and which
have entries in /usr/lib/news/active.  Here's one of the more recent
reports, as an example:

   errlog.o
   ---------
   relaynews: can't open `/usr/lib/news/active' (No such file or directory)
   relaynews: can't open `/usr/lib/news/active' (No such file or directory)
   relaynews: can't open `/usr/lib/news/active' (No such file or directory)
   relaynews: can't open `/usr/lib/news/active' (No such file or directory)
   relaynews: can't open `/usr/lib/news/active' (No such file or directory)
   ---------

   old input files:
   -rw-rw-r--  1 news            0 Oct 19 21:07 nspool.a15644
   -rw-rw-r--  1 news            0 Oct 19 21:07 nspool.a15962
   -rw-rw-r--  1 news            0 Oct 19 21:07 nspool.a15973
   -rw-rw-r--  1 news            0 Oct 23 02:11 nspool.a15614
   -rw-rw-r--  1 news            0 Oct 23 16:09 nspool.a22417

   leading five unknown newsgroups by number of articles:
     26 alt.fan.james-bond
     13 alt.fan.madonna
     12 alt.good.morning
     11 k12.library
     10 alt.sb.programmer

   etc.

Alt.fan.james-bond and alt.fan.madonna should both be valid groups:
they have 'y' entries in /usr/lib/news/active.  Any ideas?  I'm
stumped, and my current C news guru is away on vacation. :-( I don't
want the entire system to collapse on me, but I haven't a clue what to
do.