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Date: Thu, 23 Oct 1997 06:30:43 -0400 (EDT)
From: Thomas David Rivers <rivers@dignus.com>
Message-Id: <199710231030.GAA07295@lakes.dignus.com>
To: fullermd@futuresouth.com, shawn@luke.cpl.net
Subject: Re: deleted huge directory
Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG
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> 
> > > Does anyone have any suggestions for deleting a huge directory? The
> > > direcory is /var/news/spool/control/cancel. The directory is too large to
> > > even do a ls. If I try doing ls, it eats up all the avail. RAM(140+mb) and
> > > hangs. Anyone? I would try a wildcard, but I don't know what the filenames
> > > are. (This is a very large news server, and this directory has never been
> > > touch as far as I know.)
> > 
> > Dear god.
> > If you don't mind, I'll just borrow all that space.....
> > Can you get a file listing by echo * > /place/some/file.list ?
> 
> Can anyone tell me exactly what this directory is for? This months
> Boardwatch in ISP Tech Talk, the author recommends deleting this directory
> daily. And this has never been deleted, as far as I know. Or it has been a
> very long time. Does the news server read this directory during
> news.dailt? Expires have been taking FOREVER lately. I suspect this may be
> a reason. (Sorry for the off-topicness, but how to delete the directory is
> ontopic. :) )
> 
> 
> 
> 

 This is the directory that contains the cancel control messages sent
by other news systems... It grows because of the growth of SPAM, which
requires a corresponding growth of anti-SPAM cancellation messages.

 Remember; news is a store-and-forward system - so to send the cancel
message on to any news you serve, you have to save them for batching.

 Your news software has an 'expire' component (in Cnews, it's actually
an expire program.)  You can taylor that component to leave things
lying around for a while, or expire them rapidly.  When articles
are expired, they are removed from the disk (although a record is kept
for some amount of time that they were seen, to avoid looping.)

 Depending on how your out-going feeds are, you can expire things 
*very* rapidly.  At one time, on an Xenix box with little disk space,
I was expiring things twice a day.

 If you have no out-going feeds; set your expiration time on 
the 'cancel' newsgroup, as well as the 'junk' newsgroup at one day.
That way, the news software will delete it for you....


	- Dave Rivers -