From: warlock@ecst.csuchico.edu (John Kennedy)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: INN (v1.1) observations so far
Keywords: INN
Date: 4 Sep 92 18:24:57 GMT
Organization: California State University, Chico


  Here's the sum of my observatiosn so far about INN:

	(a)  It passes the look-and-feel test when you telnet to port 119.  (:
	(b)  Very little load compared to our CNews server.  Take that as a
		very unscientific observation however... I've taken liberties
		with the hardware to give it advantages over the older news
		server, so the software had better use them.  (:
	(c)  The configuration files are pretty straightforward.  It's very
		easy to add feeds.  I'm a little worried about people being
		able to read news off the feed host, however.  In the past
		I've let the other admins read from our host so they could
		check us if they thought they were going to have problems.

  One thing that seems to cause a small hoard of problems is news.daily.  I'm
currently starting up innd as "innd -d"  I'm tacking the daily report onto
the end of this for reference, but basically it looks like innd is ending up
in a funny state because it can't flush the logs.

  It makes sense.  The logs are being spewed onto the screen, so they can't
be "flushed".  However, when you tell it to flush them, it's mode shows up
as "Server paused Flushing log and syslog files".  There should probably be
a check for that.  As it is, I end up manually fixing it by throttling and
telling it to go.  I only seem to need to throttle it when the news.daily
time interrupts a incoming batch.  nntpxmit gets a "charnel greeted us with
400 Flushing log and syslog files" when you try to connect to it in this
limbo state.

  A small configuration problem seems to exist with one of the variables in the
news.daily script, "INNDDIR=/usr/local/news/innd".  If I have a weakness, it's
hating other people's directory structure.  In my config.data file, it's
not clear what this is supposed to be.  "_PATH_INNDDIR" is the obvious choice,
and it defaults to the same thing, but I've changed it and it seems to have
caught on everywhere else.

  I haven't tracked it down yet, but news.daily also spits out a "illegal io"
message.

  Heh.  INN, the only server you can say "go fish" to (after you throttle it).



! Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1992 11:07:33 -0700
! From: USENET news <news@charnel.ecst.csuchico.edu>
! Message-Id: <199209041807.AA05201@charnel.ecst.csuchico.edu>
! Subject: Daily Usenet report
! 
! Server status:
! Server running
! Parameters c 14 i 50 (0) l 1000000 o 52 t 300 normal specified
! Not reserved
! Readers separate enabled
! 
! Disk usage:
! /dev/rd1h      223502  141696   59454    70%    /b
! 
! Log file sizes:
!    0 /usr/news/tmp/errlog	   0 news.crit
!    0 /usr/news/tmp/news		   0 news.err
!    0 control.log		   0 news.notice
!    6 expire.log			   0 unwanted.log
!   26 newgroup.log
! 
! Innwatch is not running
! 
! Peer connections:
! control:10		remconn:13		localconn:12		
! 
! 
! 
! Renumbering active file.
! 
! In debug mode
! Cannot flush logs.
-- 
John Kennedy/KC6RCK/warlock@ecst.csuchico.edu  "IBM, You BM, We All BM for IBM!"
Xref: sparky news.software.b:2842 news.software.readers:1724