From: bud@rescon.UUCP (Alex Batyi)
Newsgroups: phl.misc,news.admin.misc
Subject: Re: Paths with domains
Date: 12 Jan 93 00:16:41 GMT
Followup-To: phl.misc
Distribution: phl
Organization: Resurrection Connection BBS, Bristol, PA

Many thanks to those who responded to my cry for help
Last friday at <mumble>:AM in the morning.  I lost some
of the response and so am posting to thank those whose
replies I never got to read and cannot thank via E-mail.

I was surprised to hear from Henry Spencer since I had
posted the article with a phl Distribution expecting
local help.  The first group was (is) phl.misc and
news.admin was tacked on to the end to get the admins
attention on those local machines.  Thank you Henry.
You have answered my cries before.  I should have known
this one but blocked it due to lack of necessity "back
then".

Henry writes:
>In article <721@rescon.UUCP> you write:
>>... Please nobody tell me to go get Cnews?  Please?
>>
>>I just noticed news unbatching from king.mcs.drexel.edu.  "king" to
>>our little Xenix386 box.  Then I noticed all the news spooled up
>>to go to king.  Nobody but king is sending us this much news right
>>now.  That made me sit up.  Not much could at this hour.  Ok, no
>>biggie.  Bnews thinks news is coming in from king.mcs.drexel.edu not
>>king.  Why am I nervous?  Why?  Because the more I think about it
>>the more it seems like we got a problem...
>
>I'm afraid you do.  And I'm afraid the answer is probably going to be
>the one you asked people not to tell you...  I don't think B News ever
>did get the feature needed to cope with this right (although I lost track
>of B News changes around 2.11 and may have missed it).
[ details deleted ]
>                                         Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
>                                          henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry

I knew they came out with the 18 and 19 patches to bring the Bnews
to compatibilty with Cnews but never knew the details.  After setting
up trn I noticed the "Skipping unavailable article" message on empty
newsgroups.  I wrote to Wayne Davison thinking that the last patch
to trn would help but he explained the Cnews and up-to-date Bnews
convention of setting the low article number 1 higher than the high
article number to indicate an empty group rather than a group with one
article in it.  I really like trn and this one bother was outweighed
100 times by the + command.  :-)

Bob, Internet: kupiec@hp800.lasalle.edu (or) bob%olwejo@cs.widener.edu
writes:

>Why are you still messing with Bnews?  I've installed the Cnews Performance
>Package on both olwejo and beyonet and it only took 1 day!  I was against
>upgrading to C because it seemed like B was OK.  Let me tell you, I was
>STUPID FOR NOT DUMPING BNEWS the second after I refused to upgrade!  Cnews
>makes a world of difference!  Much, much easier to admin than B.  Easier to
>config, and many, many times FASTER than B.
[ Jerry Aguirre provided the best worded explanation so details again deleted ]

I don't know Bob.  Normally I would have said because I know it
so well but after this embarrasing situ...  Things are set up so
even when I was gone due to a recent family crisis the machine kept
on working the whole time while people scratched their heads and
said "What do we do?"  Security?  Fear of the unknown? I need the Kharma?

>From: jerry@olivea.ATC.Olivetti.Com (Jerry Aguirre)
>Subject: Re: Paths with domains
>Newsgroups: phl.misc,news.admin.misc
>Organization: Olivetti ATC; Cupertino CA, USA

Jerry explained it best:
>Basically the name the site puts in the "Path:" header of articles it
>sends to you has to match the one you have as the first field in the
>sys file.  For each entry in the sys file it checks the first field
>against each entry of the path line.  If the site is already listed in
>the path then the article is not queued. 

>When your feed site changes its name, say to go to a full domain
>name instead of a short UUCP name that can cause you to queue up all
>your news back to them.  This is a waste as they already saw those
>articles and will just dump them.

>There are two posibilities.  The old method is to change:

>	king:comp,news,rec,...:F:/usr/spool/batch/king
>    to
>	king.mcs.drexel.edu:comp,news,rec,...:F:/usr/spool/batch/king

>That will still put the output in "king" because you explictly specify
>the path.  If you are not using batching then that might be a problem
>because it would not automatically put in the right system name for
>other commands.  It would also mess up your log and summary because of
>the longer name.

>The better method is to use a feature that was added to 2.11.  Change
>your sys entry to use:

>	king/king.mcs.drexel.edu:comp,news,rec,...:F:/usr/spool/batch/king

>Your news system will still refer to the site as "king" and that will be
>the default file for batching and such but it will also compare the path
>against "king.mcs.drexel.edu", their alternate name.  This keeps the
>short name for logging, reports, and queueing.

>If you need patches 18 and 19 you can ftp them from ftp.uu.net or I can
>email them to you.

>					Jerry

Jerry sent me the Patches that fixed the trn problem.
I woke up to find all of these goodies in my mailbox
and quickly fixed the sys file.  The next morning at
around 3am I watched the news come in.  Hallalulia!
Thank You one and all!
-- 
   AJB         N3JQB        +1 215 785 6644             UUCP:rescon!bud
   Quote:"If you lose your memory, forget it!"       bud@pacs.pha.pa.us
   Proverb:"The sooner you get behind, the longer you have to catch up."
Newsgroups: phl.misc,upenn.general