what are gnodes?

[Jim Reid]

In article <821 at larry.sal.wisc.edu> jwp at larry.sal.wisc.edu (Jeffrey W Percival) writes:
>We often get the message "out of gnodes" in our news partition
>on our Ultrix microvaxen.  I read up on the Unix file system,
>and learned the basics of blocks and inodes and such, but uncovered
>no reference to "gnodes".

Gnodes are DEC's term for generic inodes. Ultrix uses a virtual file
system which manipulates files using these gnodes. This is more or less
the same thing as the virtual file system inodes (vnodes) used in other
UNIX boxes running NFS. Beneath this virtual layer lie filesystem
specific data structures and routines. For a conventional UNIX file
system, these data structures will be inodes. For a VMS file system
or NFS file system, these will be something else.

>where are these described, and how do I manipulate them to prevent
>usenet news from giving us so much grief?

I would guess that 'out of gnodes' is a misleading error message that
means your news partition has run out of inodes. If so, you have two
options: delete files to free up inodes (say by expiring news articles
more rapidly) or rebuild the filesystem with a higher inode density
(check the -i option to newfs).

		Jim