🚀 go-pugleaf

Our system has been core dumping in expire for over a month now. I just caught
the tail end of a discussion about this in this group, but it didn't have any
information I could use to fix the problem.

I know absolutely nothing about how news works internally, but with a fair
amount of exploration I discovered the /usr/lib/news/history and
/user/lib/news/history.d/{0-9} files. Unfortunately, fgrepping through all
of them yielded only one line that might plausibly be causing expire to
choke (it had a seven-digit number as it's 2nd field, and if I'm right in
assuming it's a longint for seconds since 1970, that would indeed be a bad
date). I used all the bad dates reported by expire as input to fgrep, so if
the problem were in the history files, I think I should have seen it...

On the other hand, if I knew what I was doing, I wouldn't be asking for help.

This is a sample of the output from expire:
expire: : Unparsable date "62.22615@santra.uucp>        628739181"
expire: : Unparsable date "6ca> 630083756"
expire: : Unparsable date "6300855@cup.portal.com>      630086057"
expire: : Unparsable date "ragon.waterloo.edu>  628252187"
expire: : Unparsable date "6284edu>     628440723"
expire: : Unparsable date "6285s.Philips.Com>   628506653"

While I can't stand it when people say "I don't read this group but could you
please tell me...", I would appreciate email on this. I *will* be reading
this group, but there's no guarantee that any particular article will ever
be despooled here (sort of chicken-and-egg).

In summary, I don't need to know why it happened (though that would be nice),
I need to know how to fix it.

I'm running 2.11.17 (18?) B news on a SysVR2 (A/UX) machine. Or trying to...

Thanks,
Alexis Rosen
sysadmin, Panix
alexis@panix.uucp
{apple,cmcl2}!panix!alexis