Under normal circumstances, the news.daily program performs the daily maintenance tasks for the News Server. There might be times, however, when you need to take recovery steps. For example, if the HISTORY file becomes corrupted, the Expire program will not remove articles that it should.
To execute a recovery task:
From the General Administration page, click the News Server server name button > Advanced Tasks > Recovery.
Click the Do It that corresponds to the task you want to perform.
Some recovery tasks can be performed at any time. Other tasks can be performed only while the server is up or only while the server is down. The following table shows what state the server must be in to perform the recovery tasks. Additional information about each task are in the subsections that follow.
The Release the Throttled Server button only appears on the Start/Stop the Server form if the server has paused.
From the General Administration page, click the News Server server name button > Server Preferences > Start/Stop the Server.
Under News Server Status, verify that your server is accepting the connections you have specified.
If the server has paused, check the errlog to determine the cause.
The errlog is in NOVONYX\SUITESPOT\NEWS-SERVERNAME.
From the Start/Stop the Server form, click Release the Throttled Server after the problem has been identified and fixed.
News.daily is the Collabra Server program that performs the daily maintenance tasks and writes the maintenance information to a set of log files. News.daily periodically expires articles, maintains the ACTIVE and HISTORY files, rotates the log files to purge old files, and sends discussion groups to other news servers.
If running news.daily takes a long time, you can run the program from outside the Collabra Server browser interface. At the server console, type
Load sys:novonyx/suitespot/bin/news/bin/newsdly.nlm sys:novonyx/suitespot/news-servername/config/nsnews.conf
The Expire program purges articles from your spool and purges references from the HISTORY file as indicated by your configuration settings.
The ACTIVE file contains a list of all the discussion groups stored on your server. For each discussion group, the low and high articles numbers and a flag indicating the type of group are included. The server is sensitive to the exact format of this file.
Renumbering the ACTIVE file will renumber the list of discussion groups stored on your server.
Remaking the ACTIVE file rebuilds the ACTIVE file based on the contents of your spool directory. Remaking the ACTIVE file can take some time if you are supporting a lot of discussion groups. If you have a full UseNet feed, obtain a copy of the ACTIVE file from your news provider and then renumber that ACTIVE file.
If you remake the ACTIVE file, most special flag settings will be lost. For example, flag settings indicating moderated discussion groups and discussion groups that can't be posted to locally will be reset to the default settings.
The HISTORY file contains a list of the articles your server has stored and possibly expired. The HISTORY file prevents your server from accepting articles it has already accepted.
The HISTORY file includes information about the creation time of the article, the message ID, and the location of the article in the spool. (Message IDs are generated using the creation time in seconds since January 1970, appended to the process identification and the hostname for the computer that created the article.) The News Server adds a line for each article it posts to the spool.
Articles might be sent to your News Server from several other news servers. Consequently, some articles might be sent more than once. In addition, articles might be delayed several days in their various paths to your News Server. By referencing the HISTORY file, your News Server can decline articles that it has already stored.
For example, you might have an article stored for one week, and then a week later a replication site wants to send the same article to your server. News Server compares the article message ID with the list of message IDs in the HISTORY file. If your News Server has already received the file, it rejects the file from the replication site.
You specify the number of days that the HISTORY file will remember an article that it receives. Seven to fourteen days is recommended. If you set the HISTORY file to remember fewer days, your HISTORY file will be smaller, but the likelihood of getting duplicate articles increases. After the number of days specified, the server will purge old lines from the HISTORY file during the expiration process.
Rebuilding the HISTORY indexes rebuilds the HISTORY.DIR and HISTORY.PAG files from the HISTORY file.
Updating the HISTORY file opens every article to rebuild the HISTORY index.
Remaking the HISTORY file rebuilds the HISTORY file.
Recovering the overview files recovers the list of messages in each discussion group.
Remaking the search indexes rebuilds the search indexes.