"paul" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Hi, What must be done in order to get news items older than x days to be
removed in /var/spool/dnews/
We have news items in there that are almost a year old. We only want news
that is < 6 days old.
Thanks for the help!
There's no real way to do that except to reduce the % of spool of the pile the posts are in and/or reduce the total amount of spool space allocated to Dnews. Disk space is allocated in large chunks, ~10MB I think, and until Dnews needs the space a post will stay in the spool. Even if your pile says days 6, it will work that way.
The problem is DNews will only ever remove a full bucket file, and never the last bucket in a pile (Which must not be full anyway, otherwise a new one would be created).
A bucket file will only be removed based on the number of days when the following conditions are met -
1/ The bucket file is full 2/ The last item added to the bucket file has reached the required age
The solution is to place low-volume groups that will not regularly fill bucket files in a pile with groups that do have sufficient volume. You can also reduce bucket_size in dnews.conf, but doing so comes with the risk of running out of bucket files (Maximum 9999) if you have a large feed.
If you really don't want these items displayed, your best option is to scan the groups each day, and use tellnews delete_items to remove the unwanted range of messages (based on the scan of 6 days earlier). Unfortunately DNews can't do this itself, so this requires some programming/scripting, but will do the job. Note, the messages are only marked as deleted, and will remain in the spool until such time as the bucket file is expired as usual.
- Roydon L.
