News

[Robert Dinse <nanook@eskimo.com>]

     Expire failed on the news server last night because of a bad block on the
partition that /usr/lib/news is on, that was part of the history file and
expire died when it got to that point in the file. 

     I attempted to map out the bad block today and I'm not sure to what degree
I was successful.  The history file still had the bad block and so I had to
copy it to another file.  What I don't know is whether that defective block
will be allocated again and cause problems in the future or if it was
successfully added to the bad block inode. 

     /usr/lib/news is a stripped partition and bad block management seems to
work a little strangely on md partitions.  If it continues to glitch out I will
replace the drive but am hesistant to do so if not absolutely necessary as all
history will be lost and it will essentially necessary to restart the server
from scratch.  The amount of time required to generate a new history database
is such that by the time it's done everything would be expired anyway.