HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: rsalz@rodan.UU.NET (Rich Salz)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.software.nntp
Subject: Re: INN placing messages in junk
Date: 28 Dec 1992 13:19:38 -0500
Organization: UUNET Technologies Inc, Falls Church, VA
Distribution: inet
NNTP-Posting-Host: rodan.uu.net

In <92363.114424JGROVER@MAINE.MAINE.EDU> John Grover <JGROVER@MAINE.MAINE.EDU> writes:
>In article <1hn7j6INNpva@rodan.UU.NET>, rsalz@rodan.UU.NET (Rich Salz) says:
>  Rich, I respectfully disagree. On my system, I get unwanted
>  groups (that is groups not in the active file) in junk. Why? I
>  think because I set the WANT_TRASH variable in config.data to
>  DO.
Yes, I was omitting some detail, and that was probably wrong.  If you have
WANT_TRASH set to DO then articles not in the active file will be filed
into junk.  INN does not do this by default, and I really *really* discourage
you from doing it.  The interaction of DO_WANT_TRASH and 'x' groups and 'j'
groups it not intuitively obvious; some have asked me to change innd's
behavior in this case, and I've refused.

	/r$
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: jamesd@techbook.com (James Deibele)
Subject: Re: What is the advantage of INN over CNews?
Keywords: inn cnews
Organization: TECHbooks --- Public Access UNIX --- (503) 220-0636
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1992 00:02:08 GMT

zeke@fasttech.com (Bohdan Tashchuk) writes:

>In <1gofc3INNdb@milk.Warren.MENTORG.COM> tal@Warren.MENTORG.COM (Tom Limoncelli) writes:

>>Competition is really going to drive netnews software into the 21st
>>century.

>But I think it's whimsical thinking that Cnews, INN, <??????>, will be
>working furiously to outdo each other.

I'm a real fan of Cnews.  3 years ago, I replaced B news with C news.
It went in easily and ran so fast on my little 386 that I thought it was
broken --- I thought it was dropping articles into /dev/null instead of
actually writing them out.

But I'm also a <big> fan of competition, even competition among public
domain programs.  Why?  Because a lot of times the answer to "why don't
you do it this way?" is "We do it our way.  You want it that way, do it
yourself."  And I think that's a valid answer.  And as we all know, most
of us will "suffer" with existing tools rather than write something new.
But sometimes "this way" is better than the existing way.

If INN has better ideas in some areas than Cnews, I'm willing to bet 
that G&H will steal them.  But only after it's been subjected to the
kind of torture testing that Cnews has gone through.  So "competition"
is more demonstration of ideas.  Isn't Usenet a marketplace of ideas?
If you don't like this idea, wander down the .newsrc and pick something
else.  What could be more appropriate for Usenet than competition among 
the transports?  Look at the feeping creaturism in the readers ...

It's 3 years later and I'm running the Peformance Release.  I've got
three times as many groups as I did then, and I'd bet the volume in each
group is close to triple that of 3 years ago.  expire runs pretty nicely,
but every so often I have to run "mkhistory" and that's a nightmare.  
INN's "makehistory" runs about 8 times faster.  INN integrates the
functionality of NNTP and Cnews and I'd much rather deal with a set of
programs from one author or pair of authors than two separate programs.
So I'm glad to hear that they might poke around with NNTP.  

>If G&H never released another line of code I'd be happy. I'm not waiting
>for them to help "drive netnews into the 21st century". They probably have
>real jobs.

I'm convinced that aliens "walk" among us.  Nobody could have real jobs,
plus write the kind of code that Geoff does or post as many well-written 
messages as Henry does ...

I'm really interested in how the NOV database will take off.  I would
gladly pay a 10% (or larger) premium over "optimum" database size if 
the database would be usable by multiple newsreaders.  

And the next release is probably going to be "the Toll Release".  A 
penny a message sent via Electronic Funds Transfer to their Swiss bank 
account ...

--
jamesd@techbook.COM                   "2530 newsgroups & nothing on ..."  
PDaXs gives free access to news & mail. (503) 220-0636 - 1200/2400, N81  
Full internet (ftp, telnet, irc) access available. Voice: (503) 223-4245
From: rsalz@rodan.UU.NET (Rich Salz)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: This UUCP site runs INN
Date: 22 Dec 1992 11:32:10 -0500
Organization: UUNET Technologies Inc, Falls Church, VA
NNTP-Posting-Host: rodan.uu.net

In <1992Dec21.145320.1065@blilly.UUCP> lilb@sony.compuserve.com (Bruce Lilly) writes:
I am not sure what the point of Bruce's article was.  It contained a disucssion
of VM, paging, performance trade-offs, etc.  I'll lift out the news-related
questions and answer as best as I can.

>  Due to a design decision, the per-process VM
>limit is 2.5 MB, regardless of how large the swap space is.  It certainly
>sounds like INN won't run on a 3B1.
Yes it does sound like that.  However, if you ran without dbzincore() it
will might work.  (And what a stupid design decision.)

>Not every system *has* a writev().
INN includes the obvious stupid emulation (turn writev into a series of
write calls), and some notes about how you have to be careful if you turn
it into the first-pass more efficient emulation (allocating one big buffer
and doing one write).  It works without writev, but you'll now be writing
an article in six syscalls rather than one, but it's still efficient.

>>> Does innd have to be running continuously, or can it be run on an
>>> as-required basis from inetd
It will not work.  First off, you'd have to hack the source a fair
amount.  More importantly, A single innd wants ALL incoming connections;
running out of inetd means multiple innds when multiple feeds connect,
and that is very bad.  You could add a "wait" in your inetd.conf file,
but since innd doesn't exit after your first connection it would be just
as if you ran the proper configuration.

>Does INN *need* ``UNIX-domain'' sockets?
INN1.2 works without it, but it's a bit clunky:  people had to make some
patches.  In INN1.3 things are better:  they sent their diffs to me and I
included them in the mainline code.

> but it's wrong to assume that pipes will always yield
>performance better than disk files, for all systems.
The primary advantage of pipes is that they don't have to be written
out to backing store, hence performance gain.

Like other news software, INN can write batchfiles.  Since innd is a
long-running daemon, however, the ability to spawn a process and feed
the 'batchfile' on stdin was an obvious thing to do.
From: lars@cmc.com (Lars Poulsen)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.software.nntp,news.software.readers
Subject: Re: INN newbie has innd, nnrpd, trn interaction questions
Date: 23 Dec 92 05:43:35 GMT
Organization: CMC Network Systems (Rockwell DCD), Santa Barbara, CA, USA

In article <1gof2bINNpi1@spock.dis.cccd.edu>
   markb@spock.dis.cccd.edu (Mark Bixby) writes:
>I've just installed INN and I'm running it in parallel with my existing
>CNews setup (separate spools & active/history/etc files) until I'm comfortable
>with it.

Is this necessary ? And if so, why ?
I had hoped that I could just pull INN and experiment with INND as a
replacement for nntpd on a week-end without messing up the entire system
and needing to reset the news spool. If what Mark is doing is
reasonable, it willbe a long time before I can plan on having resources
to play with INN.
From: jmaynard@oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu (Jay Maynard)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: getdate.y and 1999
Date: 30 Dec 1992 20:26:47 GMT
Organization: UT Health Science Center Houston

In article <1992Dec30.194905.19891@news.ysu.edu> doug@cc.ysu.edu (Doug Sewell) writes:
>The source code (370 assembler) for the Snobat 1.9 implementation of
>Snobol4 has a note to the effect "This code will work until January 1,
>2100.  If you're still using it then, the joke's on you".

Actually, it will work until March 1, 2100... :-)

BTW, IBM themselves committed a leap year error that was a bit more esoteric:
they used a year mod 4 algorithm, but on a BCD representation of the year!
Thus, 1990 (where the relevant storage location was 0x90) was reported to be a
leap year... This problem cropped up in a couple of their COBOL compilers, as
well as an output viewing utility. They had a fix out on March 3, I think...
-- 
Jay Maynard, EMT-P, K5ZC, PP-ASEL | Never ascribe to malice that which can
jmaynard@oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu      | adequately be explained by stupidity.
 "Brought to you by the letters O, S, and by the number 2." -- Mike Levis
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: smj@sdf.lonestar.org (Stephen M. Jones)
Subject: Re: SUMMARY: how can I have private newsgroups?
Keywords: news private newsgroups
Organization: Super Dimension Fortress - Public Access Unix - Dallas, Tx.. 
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 1993 21:25:13 GMT

1992Dec31.212856.7534@rick.dgbt.doc.ca> andrew@calvin.dgbt.doc.ca (Andrew Patrick) writes:

>Another person suggested that group permission in the news/spool
>directory might work, and I have not tried this yet.

I was going to suggest this... I doubt trn, rn or nn run as a root process.
so If a user who didn't have access (or was in that group for access)
to that (or those) newsgroups would just get a message Permission Denied.


-- 
Stephen M. Jones (214)436-4622  
smj@sdf.lonestar.org <Cs&E>            sdf.sysadmin 
Xref: sparky news.software.b:3637 news.software.nntp:1726
From: artur@morgaine.puug.pt (Artur Romao)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.software.nntp
Subject: Feed problems with innd
Date: 28 Dec 92 18:47:40 GMT
Organization: PUUG - Portuguese UNIX Users Group


One of my lines in newsfeeds looks like this:

xpto\
        :to.dec4pt,to.morgaine:Wfm:

I see this as: queue (since this is a test "site") everything from groups
"to.dec4pt" and "to.morgaine" using file /usr/spool/news/out.going/xpto,
with lines looking like:

        to/morgaine/nnn <Message-ID>
        to/dec4pt/nnn <Message-ID>

When I get a feed from a server or post locally everything works fine, a line
is appended to /usr/spool/news/out.going/xpto. But then if I do

#/usr/local/lib/news/bin/innxmit dec4pt.puug.pt xpto

dec4pt.puug.pt (the server) gets the articles and
/usr/spool/news/out.going/xpto is deleted (since all went well). So far so
good. The problem is that from now on it doesn't work. Since
/usr/spool/news/out.going/xpto does not exist, a local post or a feed doesn't
appear in the file, i.e. it isn't re-created. If I send a reload command via
ctlinnd, everything gets well again.

I modified innxmit to create the file (leaving it with size 0) after the 
transfer, but, although the file exists after that, it isn't appended when
I repeat the process.

What am I missing here?

It is hard to debug in.nnrpd, since it's forked by another process. I could
fill  it with syslog messages, but it seems more useful (and easier :-) to ask
for help here. And it insn't just an in.nnrpd problem...

Thanks in advance for any help.


--
Artur M. P. Romao : PUUG - Grupo Portugues de Utilizadores do Sistema UNIX
artur@puug.pt     : Av. 24 de Julho, 134 - 7.
+351(1)395 06 42  : P-1300 LISBOA - PORTUGAL
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: aad@siemens.com (Anthony Datri)
Subject: Re: Is the performance release stable?
Organization: Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton (Plainsboro), NJ
Date: Sat, 26 Dec 1992 00:32:26 GMT

>There has been no re-release of the Performance Release (I've talked about
>doing one, but haven't found the time yet).  The software is stable and
>works well, but there are some rough edges in building and installation.

One that happened to me is this:  the perf release comes with an inews that
offloads some processing to a script called injnews.  Using this inews
silently failed for me -- nntpd would say that an article was successfully
posted, but inews would log some sort of a cat error.  I slapped in the inews
from the previous release and it seems to be working just fine.

Oddly enough, the README says something like "most of inews is written in C now",
but I found only the script.
-- 

======================================================================8--<
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.sysadmin,news.software.readers,news.admin.misc
From: simpsong@dns0.bham.ac.uk (Glyn Simpson)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.software.nntp
Subject: INN placing messages in junk
Date: 24 Dec 1992 09:50:41 GMT
Organization: The University of Birmingham, England
Distribution: inet
Reply-To: G.Simpson@bham.ac.uk
NNTP-Posting-Host: dns0.bham.ac.uk
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL8]

Is there any way of stopping junk getting filled up into the junk group 
with INN. I seem to be getting all the news i dont want there: for
example,

my newsfeeds file

ME\
	:*.*,!foo.bar::

The messages from group foo.bar appear in the junk file. However, another
group, say foo.foo may not exist on my system (yet), and i want to see those
messages in junk, not those from foo.bar which i know i dont want. Have I
misconfigured something ? Theres something about using junk in the config
file, but i think i assumed that if i hadnt set this parameter, nothing
will get filed in junk, thats not what i want.

ANy pointers anyone ?

--
Glyn Simpson, Systems Officer,  //  Voice: +44 (0) 21 414 6575
University of Birmingham        //  Fax:   +44 (0) 21 414 3952
Email: G.Simpson@bham.ac.uk     //  NIC Handle: GS56
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.software.nntp,news.software.readers
From: markb@spock.dis.cccd.edu (Mark Bixby)
Subject: Re: INN newbie has innd, nnrpd, trn interaction questions
Organization: Coast Community College District, Costa Mesa, CA
Date: Thu, 24 Dec 1992 19:30:21 GMT

In article <1992Dec23.054335.3323@spectrum.CMC.COM> lars@cmc.com (Lars Poulsen) writes:
>In article <1gof2bINNpi1@spock.dis.cccd.edu>
>   markb@spock.dis.cccd.edu (Mark Bixby) writes:
>>I've just installed INN and I'm running it in parallel with my existing
>>CNews setup (separate spools & active/history/etc files) until I'm comfortable
>>with it.
>
>Is this necessary ? And if so, why ?

It all depends on how cautious you want to be.  I consider INN to be relatively
"new" software that merits some amount of testing before dumping into
"production" environments.  In my case, I've found no major bugs with INN.  I
probably could have done it over a weekend.  Since we have a relatively small
news spool (5 days of comp.*, ~ 100MB), I thought what the heck, why not run
in parallel.

Most of my time was probably spent on making trn INN-compatible.  This has been
completed with the information received after my original posting.
-- 
Mark Bixby                         Internet: markb@spock.dis.cccd.edu
Coast Community College District   1370 Adams Avenue
District Information Services      Costa Mesa, CA, USA  92626
Technical Support                  (714) 432-5064
"You can tune a file system, but you can't tune a fish." - tunefs(1M)
From: tal@Warren.MENTORG.COM (Tom Limoncelli)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: This UUCP site runs INN
Date: 21 Dec 1992 10:08:26 -0500
Organization: Mentor Graphics -- IC Group
NNTP-Posting-Host: milk.warren.mentorg.com

In <BzHxws.187@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us> mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us (Marc Unangst) writes:

>INN wants to keep the entire history file in memory, all the time.

Bzzzt!

INN keeps the entire history.pag file in memory.  Compare
the difference:

-rw-r--r--  1 news      8959217 Dec 21 10:00 /usr/lib/news/history
-rw-r--r--  1 news          115 Dec 21 09:59 /usr/lib/news/history.dir
-rw-r--r--  1 news      1207156 Dec 21 09:59 /usr/lib/news/history.pag

It's 1/7th of what you imagine.

Tom
-- 
Tom Limoncelli -- tal@warren.mentorg.com (work) -- tal@plts.uucp (play)
Reality is stranger than fiction #943247:  The IRS granted
ANS approval as a 501c3 "charity" on September 14, 1992.
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: newsoverview & doexpire (Was: Re: Automatically flushing C News history.o)
Date: Sun, 27 Dec 1992 04:05:39 GMT
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

In article <JPM.92Dec26155451@cardhu.cs.hut.fi> jpm@cs.hut.fi (Jussi-Pekka Mantere) writes:
>   Uh, what do you mean, "the nov release"???
>
>Hmmmm... The "newsoverview" stuff by Geoff Collyer, usually referred
>to as "nov" (sic), available as world.std.com:pub/src/news/nov.dist.tar.Z.
>The doexpire in there has the code mentioned in it.

That isn't a C News release...  "nov" is "News OVerview", not "NOVember".
And if memory serves, that code is explicitly advertised as being a wee
bit experimental as yet.  Geoff simply goofed on this one.
-- 
"God willing... we shall return."       | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
       -Gene Cernan, the Moon, Dec 1972 |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Automatically flushing C News history.o
Date: Wed, 23 Dec 1992 23:05:42 GMT
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

In article <Bzo27w.2Lv@ssr.com> sdb@ssr.com (Scott Ballantyne) writes:
>... writes (about history.o):
>   Modern doexpires automate its removal already.
>
>Unless you use the -v flag to get expire statistics...

-v has nothing to do with it.  You're probably thinking of -r, which
does suppress the history.o removal... because it also suppresses the
history rebuild, so there's no need for the extra space.
-- 
"God willing... we shall return."       | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
       -Gene Cernan, the Moon, Dec 1972 |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry
From: rsalz@rodan.UU.NET (Rich Salz)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: INN weirdness
Date: 22 Dec 1992 11:20:40 -0500
Organization: UUNET Technologies Inc, Falls Church, VA
NNTP-Posting-Host: rodan.uu.net

In <hj41Hxpsjb@atlantis.psu.edu> barr@pop.psu.edu (David Barr) writes:
>	This seems rather odd that INN works like this.  I mean,
>in what circumstanses would you want not to feed a site a heirarchy
>of newsgroups, yet pass control messages for that heirarchy?
There are sites that want to see ALL newgroup messages, even if they do
not get some groups.  Suppose some undergrad posts a message to
psu.sex,comp.unix.wizards.  Email erupts around the net and a harried sys
admin is waken up at 10am to cancel the article.  They're tired, and
inadvertently post the cancel only to psu.sex.  Should the cancel get
propagated everywhere, or at least be given the option?

INN gives you the tools to be flexible.  It's a sharp tool, so you have to
be careful and read the documentation.
	/r$
From: anselmo@nic.near.net (Ed Anselmo)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: INN weirdness
Date: 21 Dec 1992 18:57:31 -0500
Organization: NEARnet, Cambridge, MA
NNTP-Posting-Host: nic.near.net
In-reply-to: kenh@leps5.phys.psu.edu's message of 21 Dec 92 21:33:01 GMT

> [ INN is forwarding this article despite attempts in the newsfeeeds
> file to limit its propagation ]

> Path: wintermute.phys.psu.edu!atlantis.psu.edu!psuvax1!psuvm!lrl
> Organization: Penn State University
> Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1992 14:11:44 EST
> From: Linda Littleton <LRL@psuvm.psu.edu>
> Message-ID: <92356.141144LRL@psuvm.psu.edu>
> Newsgroups: psu.ed.general
> Subject:: newgroup psu.ed.general
> Control: newgroup psu.ed.general
> Approved: <LRL@PSUVM>
> Lines: 1

From the innd(8) man page:

     Sites may explicitly have the ``control'' newsgroup in their
     subscription  list,  although  it is usually best to exclude
     it.  If a control message is posted to a  group  whose  name
     ends  with  the  four characters ``.ctl'' then the suffix is
     stripped off and what is left is used  as  the  group  name.
     For  example,  a cancel message posted to ``news.admin.ctl''
     will be sent to all sites that subscribe to  ``control''  or
     ``news.admin.'' Newgroup messages receive additional special
     treatment.  If the message is approved  and  posted  to  the
     name  of  the  group being created, then the message will be
     sent to all sites whose subscription  patterns  would  cause
     them to receive articles posted in that group.

Your wildcard entry is causing the newgroup to propagate offsite.
Adding "!control" to your newsfeeds entry should fix things.
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: root@cpp.uucp (Rich Bauer)
Subject: active file
Organization: Critical Path Project
Date: Sun, 27 Dec 1992 18:25:36 GMT

In /usr/lib/news/active, how do configure the file so that a few
groups are NEVER expired.  Right now I just put a large number 
in the field, but is there some way to make it so that the number
is never reached?


-- 
Rich Bauer	   	   |	UUCP...!dsinc!jabber!cpp!rich
Critical Path Project Inc  |	or.....rich@cpp.UUCP
Philadelphia PA            |    Public Access, News & Mail 
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: active file
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1992 01:38:03 GMT
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

In article <1992Dec27.182536.18576@cpp.uucp> root@cpp.uucp (Rich Bauer) writes:
>In /usr/lib/news/active, how do configure the file so that a few
>groups are NEVER expired...

Uh, this has nothing to do with "active".  Are you thinking of "explist"?
(Your message-ID form suggests you're talking about C News, although that
is something you should have specified.)  Modern C News expires understand
"never" to mean infinity, with proper safeguards against overflow etc.
-- 
"God willing... we shall return."       | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
       -Gene Cernan, the Moon, Dec 1972 |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: gary@sci34hub.sci.com (Gary Heston)
Subject: Re: Automatically flushing C News history.o
Reply-To: gary@sci34hub.sci.com (Gary Heston)
Organization: SCI Systems, Inc., Huntsville, Al.
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1992 20:59:52 GMT

In article <MRL.92Dec18123306@sun4.uai.com> mrl@uai.com (Mark R. Ludwig) writes:
>I'm trying to keep $NEWSCTL where it is.  We have about 17 megabytes
>of available space on that partition if I delete history.o.  The
>history file is about 8 megabytes.  If I don't delete history.o,
>doexpire (or something it calls) complains that it has to run with
>expire -r.

>What is the purpose of history.o?  When is it needed?  Can I automate
>the removal of history.o?  I'd like not to have to move things.$$

It's a backup copy of history, created when expire runs. It's needed
when your existing history file gets munged, and you need a quick
way of getting things going again. You can certainly automate its'
removal; just put in a cron job to kill it right before expire runs.


-- 
Gary Heston    SCI Systems, Inc.  gary@sci34hub.sci.com   site admin
The Chairman of the Board and the CFO speak for SCI. I'm neither.
"Data sheet: HSN-3000 Nuclear Event Detector. The [NED] senses the gamma
radiation pulse [from a] nuclear weapon." As if we wouldn't notice...
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: root@cpp.uucp (Rich Bauer)
Subject: Re: active file
Organization: Critical Path Project, Philadelphia
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 01:50:39 GMT

In article <Bzy4JG.Do1@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>In article <1992Dec27.182536.18576@cpp.uucp> root@cpp.uucp (Rich Bauer) writes:
>>In /usr/lib/news/active, how do configure the file so that a few
>>groups are NEVER expired...
>
>Uh, this has nothing to do with "active".  Are you thinking of "explist"?
>(Your message-ID form suggests you're talking about C News, although that
>is something you should have specified.)  Modern C News expires understand
>"never" to mean infinity, with proper safeguards against overflow etc.

Yes, I meant the "explist" file.  Thanks for the help.  I will put the
word never where the number is.


-- 
Rich Bauer	   	   |	UUCP...!dsinc!jabber!cpp!rich
Critical Path Project Inc  |	or.....rich@cpp.UUCP
Philadelphia PA            |    Public Access, News & Mail