HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: eggert@twinsun.com (Paul Eggert)
Subject: Re: INN Message-ID validation
Organization: Twin Sun, Inc
Date: Sat, 12 Sep 1992 01:49:16 GMT

wdh@grouper.mkt.csd.harris.com (W. David Higgins) writes:

>I was surprised the see the number of articles that B and C news accepts
>that INN rejects.

>The two most common errors seem to be a trailing '.' in the domain
>name (e.g. <one.bad.message@universal.widgets.com.>) and a ":" in
>the local part (e.g. <920909-bogus-12:01:02@bzzzzt.edu>).

I've been tracking nonconforming Message-IDs for some time.  There was
a big drop in their incidence rate when UUnet started rejecting them,
but even ignoring that, I think they are gradually becoming rarer.

The `:' bug usually comes from people running homebrew newsposters,
although you occasionally see it from backwaters still running an
obsolete version of NNR (a VM newsposter) that had the bug.

The trailing `.' bug usually comes from one of two causes:

    A.  Somebody is posting from NewsWatcher 1.3d1, an obsolete, buggy beta
    version of a popular Mac newsposter.

    B.	A mail-to-news gateway botch transliterates ``bad characters'' to `.'.
    This is wrong, since `.' can't be put in arbitrary spots in
    Message-IDs.  For example, last month the daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
    mail-to-news gateway took the conforming (if ugly) email Message-ID

	<315*/S=wilde/OU=komsys/OU=tik/O=ethz/PRMD=SWITCH/ADMD=ARCOM/C=CH/@MHS>

    and transliterated it into the following nonconforming Message-ID
    before trying to inject it into Usenet.

	<315*.S=wilde.OU=komsys.OU=tik.O=ethz.PRMD=SWITCH.ADMD=ARCOM.C=CH.@MHS>

    This kind of problem is becoming more common, unfortunately.
    Those old gateways should get fixed.

Another common botch is two `@'s in a Message-ID -- this usually results from
misconfiguration, e.g. <1992Sep4.160212.564@%fims@uu.psi.com>, which is
probably a pre-1992 C News configuration botch, and
<Jason_Peacock@fcircus.sat.tx.us.0cd4@fcircus.sat.tx.us>,
which is probably a Trumpet configuration botch.

And for some reason sprint.com generates nonconforming email Message-IDs,
e.g. <"YL-IFTDLN"*@sprint.com>, which arrive in Usenet through
mail-to-news gateways.
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.software.nntp
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: How to determine # of articles & Mbytes per day
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1992 20:27:51 GMT
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

In article <1992Sep4.215347.2566@zia.aoc.nrao.edu> pgreen@zia.aoc.nrao.edu (Philip Green) writes:
>What is the best way to determine the number or articles and
>megabytes that we receive per day? We are running C-news and
>receive our feed via nntp. I have been collecting the number of
>articles per day by counting the number of lines in the log 
>file which I believe is accurate. I have not yet decided on
>how to determine how many megabytes we receive per day.

The stats I do on volume are done by counting "+" lines in the log file;
this is accurate as far as we know.

Before one even thinks about "how many megabytes?", it is necessary to
have a more precise question.  Do you want to know how many megabytes
of data are transmitted (counting the headers?), or do you want to know
how much space it consumes on your system?  Because of things like the
finite size of disk blocks, the two aren't the same.  Before-and-after
df will give you some idea of space consumption.  To count bytes you'd
need something smarter.
-- 
There is nothing wrong with making      | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
mistakes, but... make *new* ones. -D.Sim|  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: rsalz@osf.org (Rich Salz)
Subject: Re: Testing INN's newsfeeds file.
Organization: Open Software Foundation
Date: Tue, 8 Sep 1992 13:02:40 GMT

In <1992Sep6.231714.12213@PA.dec.com> brister@pa.dec.com (James Brister) writes:
>	1) Is there a way to have inn report where it would send an article
>	   given a specified newsgroup and distribution without actually
>	   doing it?
No.  A Perl script to do this shouldn't be too hard.

[ How to block all of rec except rec.bicycles.soc? ]
>		!rec*, rec.bicycles.soc
>		!rec, !rec.*, rec.bicycles.soc
>	   (the wildmat(3) man page seems to imply the first one).
Hmm..  It shouldn't, please let me know so I can fix the docs.  The wildmat
manpage should only be talking about the pattern language.  The newsfeeds
manpage should talk about how these are interpreted in the context of
newsgroups.

First rule:  Don't put spaces between the patterns!

Now, assuming you don't have a group named "rec" then the "!rec" is
meaningless.  INN newsgroup subscriptions aren't like B and C News
patterns.  B and C sort of have an implied ".*" at the end of them.
So if you want all rec groups, you must have "rec.*" -- or, in this
case -- "!rec.*".

The second major difference is that the order of the patterns IS important.
Saying
	foo.bar,!foo.*
is a no-op.  Given the example above, then, you want to say
	!rec.*,rec.bicycles.soc

>	3) Is there a flag in the newfeeds file I haven't seen that 
>	   will cause the entire article being processed to be written
>	   down a pipe to a subprocess.
No; your colleague has asked for this too. :-) Perhaps in patch two or three.
	/r$
From: fenner@postscript.cs.psu.edu (Bill Fenner)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: BNF rule for newsgroup names?
Date: 15 Sep 92 05:37:17 GMT
Organization: Penn State Computer Science

In article <193rc7INNh3c@rodan.UU.NET> asp@rodan.UU.NET (Andrew Partan) writes:
|There is also a limit of 14 chars on each part of the newsgroup name,
|due to limitations of old system 5 machines that can't deal with more
|than 14 chars in a filename (directory name).

This is a widely-propogated myth.  There's as much technical reason for a
14-character limit as there is for an 8-character limit to handle MS-DOS,
or a 6-character limit because we can't forget those TOPS-10 machines...

If there is a hard limit on the length of pathname components on a particular
machine, the news software should deal with it.  I remember there was support
(incomplete?... it's been a while) in B News for truncation to 14 characters
if necessary.  Will C News do this?

Arbitrary side effects of how some systems choose to store news should not
limit how we name newsgroups.

  Bill
From: bin@primate.wisc.edu (Brain in Neutral)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Testing INN's newsfeeds file.
Date: 9 Sep 1992 14:54:35 -0500
Organization: Cafe Limbo
Reply-To: bin@primate.wisc.edu
NNTP-Posting-Host: uakari.primate.wisc.edu

From article <9225207.25879@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU>, by kre@cs.mu.oz.au (Robert Elz):
> In <1992Sep6.231714.12213@PA.dec.com> brister@pa.dec.com (James Brister) writes:
> 
> | 	1) Is there a way to have inn report where it would send an article
> | 	   given a specified newsgroup and distribution without actually
> | 	   doing it?
> 
> I don't think so, but this would be something nice to add (and quite easy).

It's extremely easy, since inn doesn't send anything anywhere unless
you tell it to.

Just don't run any innxmits or nntplinks, and look at the log files for
your receiving hosts.

Paul DuBois
dubois@primate.wisc.edu
-- 
Paul DuBois
dubois@primate.wisc.edu
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: kent@sparky.imd.sterling.com (Kent Landfield)
Subject: Re: FAQ retriever.
Organization: Sterling Software
Date: Sun, 13 Sep 1992 15:53:40 GMT
X-Md4-Signature: 9d464cf1de2df7ca929ff5b9c13bd91d

In article <3809@ecicrl.ocunix.on.ca> clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Chris Lewis) writes:
>In article <1992Sep11.194301.21530@vlsi.polymtl.ca> hans@vlsi.polymtl.ca (Hans Deragon (Hiv91)) writes:
>>Is there any FAQ retriever out there?  By FAQ retrieber, I mean a news
>>client which only function is to pick up FAQs from the server and save
>>them into files.  Files should only be updated if a new version of a FAQ
>>is found in news.answer.
>
>"rkive" from comp.sources.misc can be used to archive faqs, but it has
>to run on the server.  Or, you could educate the SA of the server to
>respect the "Expires:" headers in news.answers, so that all news.answers
>postings stay around until superceded by newer versions.

If you have an NNTP server running on your news server you can also use
archive to maintain an archive on a different system.  Rkive supports
archiving via nntp as well.

			-Kent+ 
---
Kent Landfield                   INTERNET: kent@IMD.Sterling.COM
Sterling Software, IMD           UUCP:     uunet!sparky!kent
Phone:    (402) 291-8300         FAX:      (402) 291-4362
Please send comp.sources.misc-related mail to kent@uunet.uu.net.
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: hans@vlsi.polymtl.ca (Hans Deragon (Hiv91))
Subject: FAQ retriever.
Organization: Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, lab. INFO
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1992 19:43:01 GMT

Hello.

Is there any FAQ retriever out there?  By FAQ retrieber, I mean a news
client which only function is to pick up FAQs from the server and save
them into files.  Files should only be updated if a new version of a FAQ
is found in news.answer.

I could write myself such a program, but I would like to save the time
writing it.

Thanks you in advance for your anwser.


--

                                      Hans Deragon  --- hans@info.polymtl.ca
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: geoff@world.std.com (Geoff Collyer)
Subject: Re: BNF rule for newsgroup names?
Organization: Software Tool & Die Netnews Research Center
	<BuLG5A.xH@cs.psu.edu>
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1992 02:05:45 GMT

me:
>|Yes.  There is ancient precedent: net.micro.432 (the incredibly slow Ada
>|engine from Intel).

Bill Fenner:
>Presumably, there was no "net.micro" -- if there was, what did they do when
>they hit article 432? . . .

There was indeed a net.micro; the software (B News in those days) just
skipped over the directory 432 when it tried to file article 432.  B News
and C News at least are prepared to deal with this.
-- 
Geoff Collyer		world.std.com!geoff, uunet.uu.net!geoff

``Leave the evil grasping to us.'' - A. L. Arms, UNIX licensing, WECo.
Newsgroups: news.admin.technical,news.software.b,news.software.readers
From: romain@salt.eng.pyramid.com (Romain Kang)
Subject: Re: NFS vs NNTP for news reading
Reply-To: romain@pyramid.com
Organization: Pyramid Technology Corp, San Jose, CA
Date: Thu, 10 Sep 1992 17:35:18 GMT

NFS reading plus NNTP posting has found favor in many large installations.

My (informal) observation seems to show NFS presents a lighter load
on the server than NNTP (provided the folks in your plant to run
daily "find" commands to purge core files and the like).
Context switch overhead from NFS daemons is limited by the number you
choose to run, while there are typically no limits to the number of
running NNTP daemons.  Further, some UNIX implementations recognize 
"interchangeable" service daemons and can avoid switching nfsd's,
which substantially improves system throughput.

On the other hand, posting via NFS is fraught with problems (security
and concurrent postings top the list).  In contrast, NNTP posting with
a "mini-inews" is simple.  One drawback to NNTP posting is that there
can be a delay between posting and getting feedback; it's possible a
post will fail without the user getting negative acknowledgment.
Creaky old pyramid still runs B news, and I regularly see failed
postings in /usr/spool/news/.bad; C news typically batches its input,
so I believe you can have similar problems there.  (If you were to run
INN on your server, posting delays would not be a problem, though
you've said you will use C news).

Addressing the original questions:

| Firstly: would a purely NFS solution work?

You can do it, but you probably won't be happy in the long
run because of posting problems.

| Secondly: (taking into account the bandwidth bottleneck at
| our router (which will have to handle newsflow in both
| directions, since we will _not_ be moving the router which
| is our Internet connection to net Y)) are there obvious
| benefits to one or the other approach?

If you want to throttle things way down, setting a low load
threshold in your NNTP server would probably be most effective.
Otherwise, if you want to maximize throughput, I would use
NFS for reading.

| Thirdly: is there a hybrid or other approach that would be
| superior to either of these?

My preference is outlined above.

| Finally: if the NFS solution is deemed preferable, would
| using NNTP or rsh for posting be better?

NNTP is probably better in the long run.  If your installation
grows, rsh access problems will grow even faster; if you use
NNTP, I suspect maintenance will be easier.
--
"Here, take my advice, er, umbrella.  I'm not using it myself..."
From: asp@rodan.UU.NET (Andrew Partan)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: BNF rule for newsgroup names?
Date: 15 Sep 1992 01:12:39 -0400
Organization: UUNET Communications
NNTP-Posting-Host: rodan.uu.net

In <43GQBM4D@cc.swarthmore.edu> hirai@cc.swarthmore.edu (Eiji Hirai) writes:
> Is there a definition of a legal newsgroup name?  More specifically, is
> there some BNF (or grep expression) rules for newsgroup names?  I read RFC
> 977 and RFC 1036 but neither told me anything.

There is also a limit of 14 chars on each part of the newsgroup name,
due to limitations of old system 5 machines that can't deal with more
than 14 chars in a filename (directory name).

	--asp@uunet.uu.net (Andrew Partan)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,biz.sco.general
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: LZH compression under Cnews
Date: Sat, 12 Sep 1992 22:21:54 GMT
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

In article <1992Sep12.005144.15215@jpradley.jpr.com> jpr@jpradley.jpr.com (Jean-Pierre Radley) writes:
>  root 635> compress t1 ; compress -H t2 ; l t?.Z
>  -rw-rw-r--   1 root     other      59541 Sep 11 20:02 t1.Z
>  -rw-rw-r--   1 root     other      43057 Sep 11 20:01 t2.Z
>
>Not a trivial difference, and /etc/termcap is not the most compressible of
>files.

What are the timings like?  Many sites that ship news via UUCP care much
more about CPU cycles than modem time.  There are several programs that
do better compression than good old compress at the cost of many more
CPU cycles.

>One way to fix this would be to change the code in Cnews' input/newsspool.c
>to recognize the LZH magic number as well.
>
>I recommend to Henry & Geoff that they consider so doing in the next release.

Some sort of provision for other compression methods is coming, but one
thing I do *not* want to do is maintain a steadily-growing list of magic
numbers in newsspool.c.  A more general mechanism is called for; it is
silly for newsspool to try to guess the compression method used, when
the sending host *knows*.
-- 
There is nothing wrong with making      | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
mistakes, but... make *new* ones. -D.Sim|  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: geoff@world.std.com (Geoff Collyer)
Subject: Re: BNF rule for newsgroup names?
Organization: Software Tool & Die Netnews Research Center
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1992 22:46:45 GMT

Eiji Hirai:
>Is there a definition of a legal newsgroup name?

There isn't a formal one yet, but Son-of-1036 is intended to describe the
syntax of group names.  In practice, the alphabet includes at least lower
case letters, digits, dots, plus, minus and underscore.  Upper case is
not a wise idea.  These characters are poor choices:  null, colon, slash,
space, tab, newline, control characters generally, number sign (#),
exclamation, comma, characters with the high bit set, delete, shell
metacharacters generally.  Note that some encoding (MIME?) is likely to
be used in future for group names that want to include 8-bit or wider
characters.

>But is "-hey" a valid groupname?

Good question.  It's ill-advised.

>Is "0123" a valid groupname?

Yes.  There is ancient precedent: net.micro.432 (the incredibly slow Ada
engine from Intel).
-- 
Geoff Collyer		world.std.com!geoff, uunet.uu.net!geoff

``Leave the evil grasping to us.'' - A. L. Arms, UNIX licensing, WECo.
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Another "CANCEL" question
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1992 20:44:34 GMT
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

In article <1992Aug31.183814.17218@pony.Ingres.COM> sergio@Ingres.COM (Sergio L Aponte) writes:
>	It seems relaynews wants to have a "junk" group for cancel
>	control messages to work.

No, "junk" is for groups that you subscribe to but which aren't in your
active file; are you perhaps thinking of "control"?  In any case, neither
of these is intended as an optional, configurable item; they are both
required for normal operation of the software.

>	2) If I HAVE to have a junk group, how can I set it up so
>	users don't get asked if they want to subscribe or not...

Ask the author(s) of the newsreader(s) you use.
-- 
There is nothing wrong with making      | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
mistakes, but... make *new* ones. -D.Sim|  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: BNF rule for newsgroup names?
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1992 02:14:04 GMT
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

In article <BuLG5A.xH@cs.psu.edu> fenner@postscript.cs.psu.edu (Bill Fenner) writes:
>|Yes.  There is ancient precedent: net.micro.432 (the incredibly slow Ada
>|engine from Intel).
>
>Presumably, there was no "net.micro" -- if there was, what did they do when
>they hit article 432? . . .

C News just says "hmm, there seems to be something named 432 already...
okay, I'll try 433 instead".  Agreed that it's poor practice, but at least
some :-) of the software copes properly.  I don't remember what B News did.
-- 
There is nothing wrong with making      | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
mistakes, but... make *new* ones. -D.Sim|  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.software.readers
From: SEB1525@MVS.draper.com (Steve Bacher)
Subject: Re: NFS vs NNTP for news reading
Followup-To: news.software.readers
Organization: Draper Laboratory
Date: Thu, 10 Sep 1992 22:40:00 GMT

In article <BuA5JH.Gyt@ux1.isu.edu>,
fillmore@emr1.emr.ca (Bob Fillmore 992-2832) writes:

>We used to read news from a remote site using NNTP client-server,
>and one deficiency in the NNTP protocol was very apparent.
>In rrn, when listing article titles in a newsgroup, or asking to
>read the first article in a group, there was a long delay (with periods
>marching across the screen) while the NNTP client was interrogating
>the server to see if the next article exists.  The protocol apparently
>had no way for the server to tell the client the number of the first
>article in a group.

The NNTP "GROUP" command returns the low and high numbers of the
article range.  If the reader doesn't make use of that information,
it's not the fault of the protocol.  What is probably taking a long
time is that the reader must retrieve all the unread articles from
the server, depending on the interface.  Although there are NNTP
functions like XHDR that can improve the performance, some readers
may not use them, and others may place demands on the server by
requesting more fields than the server caches (e.g. anything other
than Subject for many servers), so that the server has to read
through the entire newsgroup directory grepping for headers.

Yes, NNTP has a lot of problems, but it's still better to have a
protocol than to depend on a general-purpose file-sharing technique
that is OS-biased and poorly designed to boot.

--
Steve Bacher (Batchman)                 Draper Laboratory
Internet: seb@draper.com                Cambridge, MA, USA
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: chohan@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Harpal Chohan)
Subject: Re: Can I combine expires in Bnews?
Organization: The Ohio State University
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1992 03:40:59 GMT

In article <1992Sep10.125650.16141@wnas.DaytonOH.NCR.COM> bsakach@wnas.DaytonOH.NCR.COM (Brian Sakach) writes:
>Is it possible to combine multiple runs of expire in Bnews into just one?
>
>./expire -n control,general,junk -e 2 -E 4 
>./expire -n talk,rec,soc,misc -I -e 3 -E 5 
>./expire -n comp,news,sci -e 4 -E 6 
>./expire -n ncr -e 14 -E 21 

Nope. One of the main reasons (among others), to upgrade to something else...

-h
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: bsakach@wnas.DaytonOH.NCR.COM (Brian Sakach)
Subject: Can I combine expires in Bnews?
Organization: NCR Corporation
Date: Thu, 10 Sep 92 12:56:50 GMT

Is it possible to combine multiple runs of expire in Bnews into just one?

./expire -n control,general,junk -e 2 -E 4 
./expire -n talk,rec,soc,misc -I -e 3 -E 5 
./expire -n comp,news,sci -e 4 -E 6 
./expire -n ncr -e 14 -E 21 

-- 
* Brian.Sakach@DaytonOH.NCR.COM                                           *
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Can't get cnews to compile on a solbourne
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1992 20:59:53 GMT
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

In article <28645.9209090946@uk.ac.pel.sol1> james@sol1.poly-east-london.ac.uk (James Andrews) writes:
>The solbourne is a sparc machine running a sunos 4.1 look-a-like...
>In the build script I was pretty sure about most of the questions except
>"C news has libraries for several kinds of Unix"
>and there I took the default of v7, should I have put bsd42?

That would indeed have been better.

>doit.bin fails when trying to compile relay/hdrdefs.c

This sounds like a compiler problem; you might try looking at the notes
in doc/problems.
-- 
There is nothing wrong with making      | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
mistakes, but... make *new* ones. -D.Sim|  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: rsalz@osf.org (Rich Salz)
Subject: Re: innd error message
Organization: Open Software Foundation
Date: Thu, 10 Sep 1992 13:55:41 GMT

In <539@sacomm.schulz.unisa.edu.au> cowleym@Schulz.UniSA.edu.au () writes:
>innd: /usr/local/news/history cant dbminit ME No such file or directory
It means exactly what it says -- you have no history file.

Did you read the install manual carefully?

Try running the BUILD script -- it will create the missing files for you.
	/r$
From: urlichs@smurf.sub.org (Matthias Urlichs)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Testing INN's newsfeeds file.
Date: 8 Sep 1992 22:36:42 +0200
Organization: University of Karlsruhe, FRG
NNTP-Posting-Host: 127.0.0.1

In news.software.b, article <1992Sep6.231714.12213@PA.dec.com>,
  brister@pa.dec.com (James Brister) writes:
> 
> 	3) Is there a flag in the newfeeds file I haven't seen that 
> 	   will cause the entire article being processed to be written
> 	   down a pipe to a subprocess. (like having '::' as the third 
> 	   field in a CNews sys file).
> 
No, but it's easy.

- Assuming that you want to send one article each to a new subprocess,
  use the "Tp" flag; see newsfeeds(5).
- Assuming that you want to send lots of articles to a single
  subprocess, use "Tc,Wfb:fastbatch subprocess". 'fastbatch' is the following
  shell script and subprocess is the program which is to receive the
  articles.

#!/bin/sh
PROG="$1"
while read art size; do
    if test -r $art; then
       echo "#! rnews $size"
       cat $art
    fi
done | eval "$PROG"

Of course, you could also use the batcher that comes with INN.

NB: The "#! rnews <size>" is necessary to find article boundaries;
news articles don't have a byte count in the header and the line count is
frequently inaccurate (though you could set INN's LINECOUNT_FUZZ to zero;
I don't know how many articles this would toss).
For line-oriented processing, you could also replace that echo line
with one that calls "wc -l" on the article.

-- 
Logg's Rebuttal to Gray's Law of Programming
   n+1 trivial tasks take twice as long as n trivial tasks.
-- 
Matthias Urlichs  --  urlichs@smurf.sub.org -- urlichs@smurf.ira.uka.de   /(o\
Humboldtstrasse 7 -- 7500 Karlsruhe 1 -- Germany  --  +49-721-9612521     \o)/