Fixin' YARN
This has happened to me on occasion: I import a SOUP packet into YARN
and it goes blooey. The culprit is usually an E-Mail with high ASCII
(or extra low ASCII) characters throughout; YARN misinterprets the
message size and gets all confused as to where the next message starts,
and will just keep adding gibberish to my INBOX until I reboot the
computer. Another side effect is, my news can get bollixed.
I've had the blessed opportunity to fix my INBOX once and my news
twice in the past couple days due to calamities (one bad E-Mail, plus
my NEWS never upgraded quite right from YARN 0.88), and I thought it
might be worth someone's while if I spelled out my approach.
TO ALL YARN USERS READING THIS: Please read through the suggestions
I present *now*, because I offer some useful preventative advice.
In particular, I suggest that you make backups of your .newsrc and
your INBOX on the Unix end before you create your SOUP packets ...
that way you can recover from errors more easily.
====
Fixing the INBOX on the YARN end
1) Use the YARN utilities program "EDITFOLD" (FTPable as YUTIL04 from
a number of sources) to turn your INBOX into a more manageable
ASCII text file. (Depending on how big your corrupted INBOX is,
you may get frustrated and reboot your computer after a certain
amount of time.) For the sake of this document, we will call your
new ASCII-style INBOX file "NEWINBOX".
2) Unless you've got an insane amount of RAM and an ASCII text editor
that can easily handle files in the Megabyte range, you'll want to
clip your NEWINBOX down to a reasonable size. I wrote a program
to do this; it's called TRNCFILE. To trim the file down to 0.5 Meg,
the syntax would be:
TRNCFILE NEWINBOX NEWERBOX -500000
Okay, technically it's not reducing the size of NEWINBOX, but
creating a "NEWERBOX" file that is a copy of the first 500000
of NEWINBOX. It's the safest thing in fixes like this. Anyway,
I'll give you this program if you E-Mail me nicely. ("Nice" would
indicate that you don't screw up your address on me ...)
3) Now break out your ASCII text editor and trim the gibberish from the
bottom of NEWERBOX (see EDITFOLD instructions for file format, if
it's not incredibly obvious at first glance).
4) Use EDITFOLD once more to convert NEWERBOX into INBOX. You're done.
====
Fixing the INBOX on the Unix end
Well, I don't know how to "fix" that INBOX, but here are my suggestions
to recover from screwups:
1) In the script you use to create SOUP files, put a line in there to
copy your INBOX into a backup of some kind.
2) After fixing the YARN screwup, you can use "pine" or whatever mail
reader you like best to get at the backed-up INBOX and delete the
message or messages that offend. You can also probably delete any
mail that arrived before the evil messages, since by now they are
sitting safe and sound in your newly repaired YARN INBOX.
3) Make a SOUP packet for your newly cleaned-up backup INBOX.
====
Fixing your NEWS on the YARN end
Regrettably, I don't know how to repair a bollixed NEWS database. The
best advice I can offer is to delete all the files that offend and
start anew. I did this by finding all the files that looked to have
been changed in the past day or so that seem to involve NEWS. Here's
what I identified, as applicable on YARN 0.9x but not on 0.8x:
Under \YARN:
NEWS.DAT
HISTORY.DIR
SUPERSED.DIR
HISTORY.PAG
SUPERSED.PAG
Under \YARN\HOME\YARN:
NEWSRC
READART.DIR
NEWSRC.OLD
READART.PAG
FILTER.TMP
Under \YARN\HOME\YARN\SCORES:
-- Hard to say, I don't use SCORES and I leave it for the reader to
investigate
Under \YARN\TEMP:
*.*
Under \YARN\OVERVIEW:
*.*
====
Fixing your NEWS on the Unix end
Now this one is easy: if you have a backup of your .newsrc, just
copy it back into place; your next SOUP packet will contain all the
messages from the ill-fated packet, plus any newcomers. You may, of
course, edit your .newsrc to get some back messages too.
====
Hope this helps!