Gnats Maintenance Procedures

Before any maintenance is performed on Gnats, the following steps must be taken to prevent database corruption:

• Stop the queue and any cron'ed maintenance tasks by commenting out the contents of the gnats user's crontab.
• Make sure the gnats-adm/locks directory is empty, then chmod 0 it to disable edit-pr(1).
• Take a complete backup of the Gnats database, in case something goes wrong.

If you need to restore the database from backup, take care not to clobber the queue directory!

Once maintenance is complete, the database needs to be unfrozen so work on it can resume:

• Re-enable edit-pr(1) by setting the lock directory's access mode back to 0755.
• Restart the queue by un-commenting the gnats user's crontab.