With version 5.x of DNEWS you can now use a cyclic database, this has several advantages over the current system:
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
We believe the advantages far far out weigh the disadvantages so these new expire rules are now the default for new installations of DNEWS.
Normally DNEWS stores items in buckets, e.g. db_23.itm, each bucket is about 10MB, when you switch to the new system DNEWS adds on the PILE number, up to 30 piles can be defined normally four or five should be enough. The bucket files are then called db_23_nn.itm where 'nn' is replaced by the pile number.
You can specify for each pile, a wildcard list of groups, and a percentage of the entire spool area that can be used for that pile, if the usage ever grows above this percentage then the oldest bucket will simply be deleted. There is still a nightly expire process as DNEWS still needs to modify the indexes but this is very fast.
To convert your existing database to the new format you should do the following:
As the pile a news item is in is chosen when the item arrives, you cannot simply change the expire rules and expect currently stored items to expire faster or slower, and more importantly you cannot change the pile numbers without disasterous affects (e.g. swapping pile 1 and pile 2 around).
You can safely change the 'use %' or 'days' for any existing pile, and you can safely add piles.
If you really want to affect existing piles, then the trick is to run the tellnews command 'rebuild_piles' after modifying the expire.conf values and doing a reload. However this can take upto about 1 hour per gig of news to complete.
As buckets now have the PILE number in the name you can backup that part of the dnews database, for example with the following expire.conf sample below you could backup the local.* newsgroups with a command like this:
copy (spool_directory)\db_*_3.itm \backup
The new format of rules in expire.conf is:
pile n [use xx%] [days nn] groups wildcard_list
e.g.
pile 1 use 40% groups * pile 2 use 40% groups *binaries*,*pictures*,*warez* pile 3 days 30 groups local.* pile 4 use 1% groups control* remember 3
The LAST matching PILE is used, so specific rules should be at the END of the expire.conf file.
Using version 5.0, do these steps:
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