RumorMill Documentation

Rebuilding or recreating your databases


Occasionally because of a computer crash, power failure, or other fault, RumorMill databases may become corrupted. When this happens, RumorMill will likely do one of several things.

If any of these happen, you should try rebuilding the databases. This is done by holding down the command and option keys when starting RumorMill. Depending upon the size of your databases, this process may take from a few minutes, to five or more hours. While RumorMill is rebuilding databases, the menubar will be blank, but you should be able to switch to other applications on the machine.

If the command+option key rebuild fails, you can also try to recreate some of the databases by re-processing the article files in your database. This should only be done after you have already exhausted all other approaches. If those fail, then try these steps.

  1. Make sure RumorMill is not running. If it is running, do a quit command.
  2. Delete the following files from your Databases folder:
  3. Restart RumorMill. It should get an error and will exit after you acknowledge the error. This restart recreated the databases you just deleted.
  4. Restart RumorMill again. It should start up with no problems this time.
  5. From the same machine*, use a Telnet program to connect to RumorMill on port 119.
  6. Type the command XTEST -1 followed by a return.

Depending upon number and size of article files in your database, RumorMill may run for quite some time reconstructing the indexing into your article database.


It is worth pointing out that you can save the following databases using commands in RumorMill.

It is recommended that these be periodically saved in case these databases must be rebuilt from scratch. You can do that by deleting the old file (after quitting out of RumorMill), restarting RumorMill, and then using the appropriate Create command to read the file you previously saved.


* You can connect from another computer via Telnet. But in that case you must use the XPASS <password> command to allow access to the administrative commands.