[leafnode-list] Xref message id number

[Matthias Andree]

Neil wrote:

> I use leafnode 1.9.46.rel for info, but I'm not sure that's important.

As you need to install anew anyways, please go for 1.9.49.rel which was
set loose today.

> Can I set the message id number on my new leafnode news server to
> start at a different value than 1? e.g. 498302? I want to avoid
> conflicts in the database with duplicate message id numbers.

And you can:

1. install and configure leafnode

2. run "fetchnews -f" to obtain a group list from your upstream

3. edit leaf.node/groupinfo in an editor:

   - find the line with your group's name, it might look like this:

uk.rec.motorcycles 1 1 1073099602 for discussion of motorcycle issues relevant to the UK

   - change the first number to your starting value minus 1, in your
   example:

uk.rec.motorcycles 498301 1 1073099602 for discussion of motorcycle issues
relevant to the UK

   If you forget about the "minus 1" part, nevermind, you'll just have a
   gap in the numbers (498302 will then be missing), but they'll still
   be unique to that group.

   Background information: the fields are:

   name last first time-created description

   where name and description are strings, the others are long integer
   numbers, last and first (in that order) are the highest and lowest
   article number in use in that group, and time-created is the number
   of seconds since epoch, 1970-01-01 00:00 GMT

4. done! Continue with the usual fetchnews/texpire cron jobs,
   newsreaders, your custom SQL feeder, anything.

Warning: doing this with a non-empty group with low article numbers in
actual use and setting yours very high can make texpire unable to run or
consume ridiculous amounts of memory, texpire will allocate 12+H bytes
(16+H on 64-bit computers), where H is the average malloc overhead
multiplied by (last - first + 1) plus room for the overview file.

Beware of older leafnode versions though, some weren't very careful with
handling the groupinfo file and could lose the "last" information, but I
recall the details only faintly and don't care to look them up.
1.9.49 doesn't have this problem.

HTH,
Matthias