HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: rsalz@osf.org (Rich Salz)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: expire.pl: A Perl expire for INN
Date: 15 Sep 92 18:36:42 GMT
Organization: INN commentary

In <lbca4lINNbjm@utkcs2.cs.utk.edu> jepeway@cs.utk.edu (Chris Jepeway) writes:
>And, in the "what-the-hell/why-not" department, here's a Perl
>version of expire that'll handle INN's expire.ctl format.
More accurately:  Chris got this up and working while the beta folks were
still wrestling with a broken INN expire.

It's a nice job.
	/r$
From: asp@rodan.UU.NET (Andrew Partan)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Messages rejected by UUNET (was: INN Message-ID validation)
Date: 13 Sep 1992 00:44:30 -0400
Organization: UUNET Communications
NNTP-Posting-Host: rodan.uu.net

In article <h9@byu.edu>, gritton@colorado.et.byu.edu (Jamie Gritton) writes:
>    Since so much news goes through UUNET (or simply *to* UUNET if they
> get discarded there) before going my other places, the list of their
> rejected messages would be a welcome addition to the stats UUNET
> already posts. How feasible would posting such a list be?

We are working on just such a posting.  Its almost ready to go out.

	--asp@uunet.uu.net (Andrew Partan)

Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: kak@hico2.westmark.com (Kris A. Kugel)
Subject: Problem with ihave/sendme and cnews
Keywords: performance, cnews, ihave
Reply-To: query@hico2.westmark.com
Organization: High Country Software
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1992 05:15:52 GMT


I'm getting the following error message from cnews (split here onto
two lines):

relaynews: can't open `out.going/sonyd1.Broadcast.Sony.COM.ihave/togo'
(No such file or directory)

These are the lines from my active file: 

sonyd1/sonyd1.Broadcast.Sony.COM:comp.sys.3b1,comp.sources.3b1,to.sonyd1,nj/all:F:
sonyd1/sonyd1.Broadcast.Sony.COM:all,!local,!to.all,to.sonyd1/all:L2F:
sonyd1/sonyd1.Broadcast.Sony.COM:all,!local,!to.all,to.sonyd1/nj:F:

So it looks like my news is not responding correctly to ihave messages
from sonyd1.  This is with the fairly recent "performance" release of cnews.
Anybody out there know anything about this?

( Reply by mail, I-don't-get-this-group-here )

Kris A. Kugel	908-842-2707
hico2!query	query@hico2.westmark.com
Newsgroups: news.admin.technical,news.software.b,news.software.readers
From: fillmore@emr1.emr.ca (Bob Fillmore 992-2832)
Subject: Re: NFS vs NNTP for news reading
Organization: Energy, Mines, and Resources, Ottawa
Date: Tue, 8 Sep 1992 22:09:17 GMT

In article <Bu8pDC.HJ5@ux1.isu.edu> axs@cs.bham.ac.uk (Aaron Sloman) writes:
>simmdan@ux1.isu.edu = ted@telematics.com (Ted Goldblatt) writes:
>
>> Date: 4 Sep 92 21:53:59 GMT
>> Sender: simmdan@ux1.isu.edu (Daniel Simmons)
>> Organization: Telematics Intl., Inc.; Ft. Lauderdale, FL
>
>> Is it the sense of the net (:-)) that having the news server
>> feed the news readers via nntp is preferable to feeding via
>> (read only) exported NFS filesystems, or vice versa?
>
>One problem with nntp is that it provides only a limited set of ways
>of accessing the news directories. For some users it is important to
>be able to apply any Unix utility (e.g. grep) to news files. Cross
>mounting disks via NFS makes this possible.
>
>Also it is very easy to tailor an editor to be a news reader when
>news directories and articles are available as standard directories
>and files. It is a lot more work to make them use NNTP.
>
>My colleagues here believe that using NFS would provide a far
>heavier compute load on the news server than using NNTP. I don't
>really believe this but have not been able to do any comparisons.

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 problem is not as great in an ethernet environment, but it does
add to the network load.  We now have our own news server, and we
service news clients two ways:  NNTP only, and NFS for reading with
NNTP for posting.  The latter seems to be more efficient, but I haven't
tried to measure the difference in impact on the server.

-- 
Bob Fillmore, Technical Services Division          email: fillmore@emr.ca
  Information Management Branch,                   BIX:   bfillmore      
  Energy, Mines, & Resources Canada                Voice: (613) 992-2832
  580 Booth St., Ottawa, Ontario, Canada  K1A 0E4  FAX:   (613) 996-2953
From: blarson@blars.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: BNF rule for newsgroup names?
Date: 15 Sep 92 03:15:28 GMT

In article <BuLG5A.xH@cs.psu.edu> fenner@postscript.cs.psu.edu (Bill Fenner) writes:
>Presumably, there was no "net.micro" 

Presumed wrong.

>-- if there was, what did they do when
>they hit article 432? . . .

Something wonderful.  Use your imagination: the directory was opened
for writing and the article replaced the directory entries. :-)

-- 
blarson@usc.edu			usc!blarson			blarson@zog
		C news and rn for os9/68k!
I think I hear a scream.  A great many dramatic situations begin with a scream.
							-- Barbarella
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: hirai@cc.swarthmore.edu (Eiji Hirai)
Subject: BNF rule for newsgroup names?
Organization: Information Services, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, USA
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1992 20:06:38 GMT

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.

If there are no hard and fast rules, are there any defacto rules?

I'm assuming that it's something like:

	newsgroup ::= name || name "." newsgroup
	name ::= 1*<char lowercase, and uppercase letters, digits, and "-">

But is "-hey" a valid groupname?  Is "0123" a valid groupname?

My goal is to create a local newsgroup that'll show up first in any
alphabetical listing.  What's the best way to do this?

We run cnews 22-Dec-1991 with nntp 1.5.11 on Ultrix 4.2A, but plan to
upgrade to inn 1.1, if that matters.

--
Eiji Hirai <hirai@cc.swarthmore.edu>    :     :    :   :  : :: ::: :::: :::::
Unix Geek for Swarthmore College        :     :    :   :  : :: ::: :::: :::::
Information Services, Swarthmore, PA, USA.      Copyright 1992 by Eiji Hirai.
I don't speak for Swarthmore College.                    All Rights Reserved.
From: rsnyder@atl.ge.com (Bob Snyder)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: example INN newsfeeds file
Date: 6 Sep 92 21:46:21 GMT
Organization: General Electric Company

I'm looking for a few people to send me their newsfeeds file for INN.  I'm  
going slightly insane trying to figure out how to get ours set up.  I have a  
test server up and running, and is getting news from our primary server, but  
no news is making it out.....

Thanks,
Bob
--
Bob Snyder, Computing Services, GE Aerospace, Advanced Technology Labs
rsnyder@atl.ge.com, (609) 866-6672, FAX: (609) 866-6397, DialComm 8*777-6672
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: cowleym@Schulz.UniSA.edu.au
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: innd error message
Date: 10 Sep 92 06:25:51 GMT
Reply-To: cowleym@Schulz.UniSA.edu.au ()
Organization: University of South Australia


Any ideas what this means:

innd: ME descriptors 64
innd: ME outgoing 52
innd: /usr/local/news/history cant dbminit ME No such file or directory

I'm trying to start INN on a DS5000, under Ultrix 4.2A
In rc.news I set FLAGS = "-i0 -d -f" before running it.
--
AusMail: Margaret Cowley, UniSA, Schulz Building, Kintore Ave.,Adelaide,SAust.
E-Mail : cowleym@Schulz.UniSA.edu.au, Phone:+61 8 302 1627, FAX:+61 8 302 2602
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: tal@Warren.MENTORG.COM (Tom Limoncelli)
Subject: Re: Is something slowing down my c-news?
Organization: Mentor Graphics -- IC Group
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1992 03:36:07 GMT

In <1992Sep5.162649.10750@kosman.uucp> kevin@kosman.uucp (Kevin O'Gorman) writes:

>It had a logjam this week, so I was watching it process 1000 batches of
>inbound news; it took 2 days.  By looking at the log file, I calculated that's
>20 articles a minute, one every 3 seconds.  I'm not impressed.  During much
>of this time, the machine had no other load.  The input stream is nntp, and
>the batches are not compressed.

I had this problem once.  Somehow /usr/bin/rm had been, um, deleted
(stop laughing, I don't know how it happened as *I* wasn't logged in at
the time) and lock files got screwed up.  We were left with 1000
batches waiting to be processed.

If you grep newsrun for "head", you'll see that it does a complete
directory scan and then only processes the first N batches that it
finds.  If N is low, you get many directory scans to get rid of the
backlog.  If N is too big you risk overrunning shell line-length limits
and you get strange problems.  Long directory scans are a heavy hit on
some systems.  I increased N to 550[*] and haven't had problems since.

I'd tell you if the newest C news improves on this, but I haven't
installed it.

>What questions should I be asking?

Well, if you run SCO Unix, did you compile dbz.c with the optimizer
turned on?  Did you use SCO's compiler or GNU's?

Tom

[*] I don't remember how I came up with that number, but it was picked
because I assumed (I know, you shouldn't assume things) the shell limit
might be near 32K and the file names wouldn't be longer than 58 bytes,
so 32K/59 is ~550.  Considering that the file names should be less than
half of that, and the limit might be 64K, picking any random number might
have been just as good.
-- 
Tom Limoncelli -- tal@warren.mentorg.com (work) -- tal@plts.uucp (play)
       Both candidates are offering economic packages, but only
      one candidate has the ability to give us a President Quayle.
Xref: sparky news.software.b:2869 news.software.nntp:1100
From: doug@cc.ysu.edu (Doug Sewell)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.software.nntp
Subject: Re: mail2news subject line missing
Date: 5 Sep 92 16:06:55 GMT
Followup-To: news.software.b
Distribution: usa
Organization: Bush in 92 ? NOT!
X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL4

(note newsgroups and followup-to)

I've the same problem - one of the mailing lists I gateway into a local
newsgroup regularly gets articles without Subject: headers.

Rather than mess with mail2news, I wrote this quick hack.  It inserts
a default subject, and also logs the traffic through the gateway script
to /tmp/mn-log (I can't pass the -i or -r flags to relaynews from the
mail2news command-line, and if I wanted to fix that, then I'd just add
the default-subject code to mail2news... which is what I was avoiding).  

I just put "/usr/lib/news/bin/mn-front ....." into my /usr/lib/aliases,
in place of /usr/lib/news/bin/mail2news.  The code could be written
cleaner/neater/more concisely, but I'm also debugging a problem with
my mailer (I'm to lazy to replace NCR's broken sendmail with smail3
on a machine that does so little mail in the first place). 

There are no guarantees, but it seems to work for me.

#! /bin/sh
# front-end for mail2news, insert default subject, log traffic
cat > /tmp/art$$
issub=`sed -e '/^$/,$d' < /tmp/art$$ | grep '^Subject:'`
if [ /"$issub" != / ]; then
/usr/lib/news/bin/mail2news $* < /tmp/art$$ 2>&1 >> /tmp/mn-log
else
sed -e '/^From:/a\
Subject: none' < /tmp/art$$ > /tmp/artfix$$
/usr/lib/news/bin/mail2news $* < /tmp/artfix$$  2>&1 >> /tmp/mn-log
fi
# un-comment the next line for debugging 
rm /tmp/art$$ /tmp/artfix$$
exit 0
--
Doug Sewell, Tech Support, Computer Center, Youngstown State University
doug@cc.ysu.edu	   doug@ysub.bitnet	<internet>!cc.ysu.edu!doug
"Recession: your friend loses his job.  Depression: you lose your job.
Recovery: Bush loses his job" - Bill Davidsen
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: tale@ten.uu.net (David C Lawrence)
Subject: Re: BNF rule for newsgroup names?
Organization: UUNET Technologies, Inc.
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1992 23:07:24 GMT

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 none to my knowledge.

   If there are no hard and fast rules, are there any defacto rules?

C News rejects space, tab, colon and bang in newgroup.
  (ASCII 0x20, 0x09, 0x3A and 0x21 respectively.)
INN rejects space, tab, colon and slash in newgroup.  
  (ASCII 0x20, 0x09, 0x3A and 0x2F respectively.)

   I'm assuming that it's something like:

           newsgroup ::= name || name "." newsgroup
           name ::= 1*<char lowercase, and uppercase letters, digits, and "-">

   But is "-hey" a valid groupname?  Is "0123" a valid groupname?

I would suggest this.  It describes all group names in UUNET's
newsgroups file, with some liberalness.

newsgroup       = name / name "." newsgroup
name            = *namechar LOWERALPHA *namechar
namechar        = ( LOWERALPHA / DIGIT / PLUS / MINUS / UNDERBAR )
LOWERALPHA      = <lowercase alphabetic letters, 0x61-0x7A>
DIGIT           = <numeric digits, 0x30-0x39>
PLUS            = <"+", 0x2B>
MINUS           = <"-", 0x2D>
UNDERBAR        = <"_", 0x5F>

LOWERALPHA could include 0x7B and 0x7C, which are ASCII "|" and "{",
because they are Finnish lowercase letters.  Apparently they are not
using them in sfnet.* names, however, but only in group descriptions.

I know of no widely distributed newsgroup which starts with something
other than traditional LOWERALPHA, though thirteen of them do begin
with DIGIT in latter name parts.  alt.tv.90210 was recently newgrouped
and is being carried by some sites with an all-numeric name part.  I
consider this to be a mistake, and wrote the "name" rule to indicate
so.  (I am particularly opposed to all digit elements, though the rule
as written clearly disallows things like "+.---.+" and other cute
things like it.)

   My goal is to create a local newsgroup that'll show up first in any
   alphabetical listing.  What's the best way to do this?

As long as its local, I would think you can away with starting it with
+.  I don't advocate subjecting the rest of the net to it ever, though.
Xref: sparky news.software.b:2930 news.software.readers:1799
From: john@iastate.edu (John Hascall)
Newsgroups: news.admin.technical,news.software.b,news.software.readers
Subject: Re: NFS vs NNTP for news reading
Date: 13 Sep 92 05:23:28 GMT
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames, IA

In article <Bu8pDC.HJ5@ux1.isu.edu> axs@cs.bham.ac.uk (Aaron Sloman) writes:

}One problem with nntp is that it provides only a limited set of ways
}of accessing the news directories. For some users it is important to
}be able to apply any Unix utility (e.g. grep) to news files. Cross
}mounting disks via NFS makes this possible.

Some of us see this as an NNTP advantage -- having an (irrational?) fear
of a couple hundred students grepping through a gigabyte of news...

John
-- 
John Hascall                                       ``Live with it pink-boy!''
Project Vincent                                                              
Iowa State University Computation Center                     john@iastate.edu
Ames, IA  50011                                      515/294-9551 [fax -1717]
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: geoff@world.std.com (Geoff Collyer)
Subject: Re: Problem with ihave/sendme and c news
Keywords: performance, c news, ihave
Organization: Software Tool & Die Netnews Research Center
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1992 15:40:28 GMT

Kris A. Kugel:
>I'm getting the following error message from cnews (split here onto
>two lines):
>relaynews: can't open `out.going/sonyd1.Broadcast.Sony.COM.ihave/togo'
>(No such file or directory)

>These are the lines from my active [sic] file:
>sonyd1/sonyd1.Broadcast.Sony.COM:comp.sys.3b1,comp.sources.3b1,to.sonyd1,nj/all:F:
>sonyd1/sonyd1.Broadcast.Sony.COM:all,!local,!to.all,to.sonyd1/all:L2F:
>sonyd1/sonyd1.Broadcast.Sony.COM:all,!local,!to.all,to.sonyd1/nj:F:

>So it looks like my news is not responding correctly to ihave messages
>from sonyd1.  This is with the fairly recent "performance" release of cnews.

It looks like relaynews is, in fact, responding correctly to ihave
messages, but you aren't sent up for ihave/sendme.  Have you created
out.going/sonyd1.Broadcast.Sony.COM.ihave (and
out.going/sonyd1.Broadcast.Sony.COM.sendme)?

If you want to run ihave/sendme to sonyd1, please see doc/ihave.  If not,
what's the problem?
-- 
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
Subject: Looking for patch to allow multiple partitions for news spool
From: john@actrix.gen.nz (John Vorstermans)
Date: Sat, 12 Sep 1992 05:48:43 GMT
Organization: Actrix Information Exchange

I would appreciate it if  someone could post me the patch for the DEC22 version
of Cnews which would allow me to mount several partitions on my news spool
to allow me to spread out a little.

We are running Interactive Unix V3.2 3.0.

Our present problem is that we are running out of disk space (inodes) on our
current partition which has been set to the maximum allowable (65,000). I 
believe that there are several patches available which will allow me to 
copy articles across filesystems rather than using symbolic links.

Any help would be most appreciated.

Thanks inadvance.

John Vorstermans
Lines: 12
Date: Sat, 12 Sep 92 15:30:04 MDT
From: gritton@colorado.et.byu.edu (Jamie Gritton)
Organization: Brigham Young University, Provo UT USA
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Messages rejected by UUNET (was: INN Message-ID validation)
Reply-To: gritton@byu.edu

eggert@twinsun.com (Paul Eggert) writes:

> 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.

   Since so much news goes through UUNET (or simply *to* UUNET if they
get discarded there) before going my other places, the list of their
rejected messages would be a welcome addition to the stats UUNET
already posts. How feasible would posting such a list be?
--
James Gritton - gritton@byu.edu - I disclaim
Newsgroups: news.admin.technical,news.software.b,news.software.readers
From: fitz@wang.com (Tom Fitzgerald)
Subject: Re: NFS vs NNTP for news reading
Keywords: NNTP
Organization: Wang Labs, Lowell MA, USA
Date: Thu, 10 Sep 1992 17:34:43 GMT

> >Apart from efficiency the main argument that has been used here
> >against NFS is that news is currently on our gateway machine, and
> >if we ran NFS on that machine it would be a major security hole.
> >I don't know how serious a worry this is.

If you mean it's your Internet gateway, you might want to block all NFS
traffic from coming through your router.  This would be a good idea in
any case.

ntmtv!harthc@ames.arc.nasa.gov (Howard Hart) writes:

> Don't forget that wonderful feature of NFS when partitions are mounted
> read/write (such as the case where you have to mount the news batch
> directory read/write for users to post articles).

You _really_ don't want to use NFS for posting.  Locks don't work right and
all sorts of bad things can happen.  It works fine using NFS to read and
NNTP to post.  This also eliminates one of the major problems with reading
via NNTP, having a separate nntpd process using up RAM for each user
reading news.

> Don't know about
> other machines, but on Sun's, if you loose the server, the client
> hangs indefinitely (I was told at one time that NFS writes have
> higher interrupt priority than mouse clicks, so I do mean complete
> screen/window lockup).

Could you explain this a little further?  There's no such thing as an NFS
write interrupt, and I have a very hard time believing that the Sun sits
there in the ethernet driver with interrupts disabled waiting for the NFS
response packet to arrive.  Yes, if you hard-mount the disk, any attempt
to read it will hang until the server comes up, but there's no reason to
hard-mount a news partition.

There are other arguments against NNTP for reading.  While NNTP and NFS use
comparable amounts of CPU on the server (as far as I can tell), NNTP
requires a separate daemon process for each reader, which chews up your
physical memory.  A fixed number of nfsd processes can support any number
of readers.  Second, if people are reading news via NNTP when the server or
the net goes down, their newsreaders generally exit rudely, losing whatever
variables, filenames, etc they've modified during the session.  With NFS,
they can leave the newsreader running (but hung) and start re-reading
immediately when the server comes back up.

My worst problem with using NFS for reading news is that I can't tell who's
reading news at any given time, so I can't tell who out of the 200 possible
users need to be warned if the server is coming down.  At least with NNTP
you've got a netstat display.  I don't think this is a big enough problem to
switch over to NNTP.

> I'd strongly recommend NNTP-only.

I'd recommend NFS for reading, news soft-mounted read-only, NNTP for
posting.

-- 
Tom Fitzgerald   Wang Labs       fitz@wang.com   "I went to the universe today;
1-508-967-5278   Lowell MA, USA                   It was closed...."
From: james@sol1.poly-east-london.ac.uk (James Andrews)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: thanks
Date: 10 Sep 1992 11:10:45 -0500
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu

Thanks to everyone who responded to my question about compiling c-news
on a solbourne.  I set the system type to bsd42,as recommended, and
after a little bit of mucking about ( renaming a directory called alternate-
sorry I dont remember where ) it compiled fine.


Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: ian@HiElSys.DIALix.oz.au (Ian Hilliard)
Subject: Re: Cnews ranlib problem on SCO UNIX 3.2.2
Organization: Hilliard Electronic Systems
Date: Fri, 04 Sep 92 13:09:43 GMT
Keywords: cnews sco

rmartin@melpar.UUCP (Rich Martin) wrote:

> trying to install cnews (2 May 1992 release) on an SCO UNIX 3.2.2
> ranlib: ../libcnews.a:not an archive

This sounds like the problem I had when compiling Cnews. I cured it by
removing libcnews.a. Then everything worked fine.

Regards Ian

-- 

Ian Hilliard    --    ian@HiElSys.DIALix.oz.au    --    Perth, Western Australia
             A wise man is one who realises he needs to learn more.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: news.admin.technical,news.software.b,news.software.readers
From: geoff@world.std.com (Geoff Collyer)
Subject: Re: NFS vs NNTP for news reading
Organization: Software Tool & Die Netnews Research Center
Date: Thu, 10 Sep 1992 17:37:14 GMT

Howard Hart:
>Don't forget that wonderful feature of NFS when partitions are mounted
>read/write (such as the case where you have to mount the news batch
>directory read/write for users to post articles). Don't know about
>other machines, but on Sun's, if you loose the server, the client
>hangs indefinitely [...]  I'd strongly recommend NNTP-only.

That seems a poor reason to use NNTP for reading.  Mount the news spool
read-only, and "soft" or "intr", and post via NNTP or rsh.  I strongly
recommend NFS-only reading (as distinct from posting).
-- 
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,news.software.nntp