From: weave@apache.dtcc.edu (Ken Weaverling)
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp,comp.sys.m88k,udel.general
Subject: Summary: Problems & Solutions getting INN to work
Followup-To: news.software.nntp
Date: 13 Nov 1992 07:52:02 -0500
Organization: Delaware Technical & Community College
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: apache.dtcc.edu

I am proud to report that Delaware Technical & Community College is now a
usenet news site.  I've been fighting for this and internet access for
over four years.  It feels good to finally join the rest of the world. 

I decided to install INN instead of [BC]news and -- with a lot of help
from the site that agreed to feed us -- I got it going.  I would like
to post my trails and tribulations to hopefully help others in installing
INN.  I also have a few outstanding questions at the end.

Tom Limoncelli's "Debugging guide to Inn" that was posted to
news.software.nntp was a VERY useful tool.  Rich Saltz's FAQ list was also
very helpful in getting Inn running here. I hope both of these documents
end up in the distribution files for INN.

I'd also publically like to thank Doke Scott at the University of Delaware
for agreeing to feed me and for the help he gave me.  Thank God he was
familiar with INN! 

And most importantly, I am really grateful to Rich Salz for making INN
possible!

The software has been installed on a Data General AViiON 4120, which 
runs Unix Sys 5.4.2

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Compiling went off pretty much without a hitch, except lint failed with
a tremendous number of errors. I eventually turned the damn thing off
so the rest of the system would compile up.  Maybe not a good idea but...

The newsfeeds file was tough.  I read tfm a few times before I spied upon
the meaning of ME (my fault), though it never hit me that this was 
a default entry that all other entries are taken from. 

What would help newcomers I believe is an example of a minimal newsfeeds 
setup for a new site that has one site feeding them, and be able to 
post stuff back to that site.

An innocent mistake in passwd.nntp caused all of my postings to be rejected. 
I read the comments in the file and determined I only needed the first
entry included, so I stuck null fields in for everything else. Trouble
was that I put in three : because I saw there were four fields, as in...

feedersite:::

This caused "style" to default to authinfo and I couldn't authenticate 
with the other site. It should have been...

feedersite::

Of course, looking at the Format: comment, I see host:name:pass[:style]
so that is pretty clear ... I guess! :-)

Another mistake I made was running news.daily manually as root the first
time.  That created all kind of files with owner root.  The next few
times news.daily ran, it'd fail in various places with file permission
errors.  I had to run around and chown stuff back to news... Stupid
mistake on my part.

I also made a mistake in inn.conf's server entry. For some reason, my
brain parsed the comment "Local NNTP server host to connect to" to mean
the host that was feeding me.  This actually still worked OK.  Postings
would go to the feeder site, then come propogate to me. I only noticed
trouble when I tried to cancel an article and it refused because the
sender site was not my own. I then set it my own machine, and canceling
then worked fine. 

I realise that I have the "double hosts" problem in my path and how I
should fix it.  At this point, "I couldn't care less"!!! :-)  Seems
trivial right now!

++++++++++++++++++++

Some outstanding questions:

What do I do with the moderators file? Do I just leave it to send stuff
to my nearest well-connected site or do I take the news posting of moderated
newsgroups from the news.answers group and munge it there. Is this file
updated when a newgroup for a moderated group comes through?

Am I going to have problems running mthreads in daemon mode? Is it going
to trip over anything? For example, while news.daily runs, it throttles
the server.  Will mthreads kick in and modify something he shouldn't
while news.daily is running?

And most importantly....

         !!!!!!!!! HOW DO I TURN THIS DAMN THING OFF !!!!!!!!!

There was no script for shutdown.  Should I create an rc script that
runs on shutdown to throttle and then shutdown the server, or will a
SIGTERM cause the proper cleanup and disconnection?

+++++++++++++++++++++

I'd like to end this by claiming that this is the first posting from
Del-Tech, but a student operator of mine beat me to it by posting some
drivel to a rec.games.frp group... :-(

-- 
Ken Weaverling,  Sys Admin/Faith Healer,  Delaware Tech College  weave@dtcc.edu

"Is it too late to change the way we're bound to go? Surely one of us must know"
			-- Sandy Denny,  1948-1978