HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: jhood@smoke.marlboro.vt.us (Lord Yertle)
Subject: Re: backups on the news partition
Organization: Cthulhu Worship Meeting of Southern Vermont, US
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1993 03:28:01 GMT

In article <C0KKpo.63w@ccu.umanitoba.ca> mills@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Gary
Mills) writes:

>I'm wondering how other news admins do backups on the news partitions?

I don't.  If I lose it, news will just be a little thin for a little
while.  Everything also fit onto one tape without the news spool, so I
was much likelier to actually do the backup on my home system.  (It
doesn't fit anymore, and gee, I *am* a tad overdue for a backup.)

The Voice of Experience Speaks: I have lost that partition. :)
Obviously, you don't care about the news articles in this situation,
but you do care about in.coming/, out.going/, and your threaded
newsreaders' stuff existing and having the proper files therein.

That doesn't necessarily mean I've bothered to tweak my backup so that
it actually saves these things.  It took about a half-hour to get
everything figured out.

  --jh
-- 
John Hood					Cthulhu-- just imagine it!
jhood@smoke.marlboro.vt.us
Duke U, 1980:  "Okay, so a few systems have the net started. What next?"
Newsgroups: news.admin.misc
From: maffeis@ifi.unizh.ch (Silvano Maffeis)
Subject: Automatic reply to test postings
Organization: University of Zurich, Department of Computer Science
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 93 13:01:43 GMT

Hi all

I have a perl script which sends a confirmation e-mail 
to postings showing up in test newsgroups.

Question: On what test groups can I/shouldn't I use it?

Thanks!
silvano


-- 
Silvano Maffeis       CS Dept. University of Zurich, Switzerland
   RFC822: maffeis@ifi.unizh.ch            voice: +411 257 43 27
   X.400: /S=maffeis/OU=ifi/O=unizh/PRMD=SWITCH/ADMD=ARCOM/C=CH/
From: pjg@acsu.buffalo.edu (Paul Graham)
Newsgroups: news.admin.misc
Subject: Re: backups on the news partition
Date: 11 Jan 93 04:40:01 GMT
Organization: University at Buffalo

mills@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Gary Mills) writes:
|I'm wondering how other news admins do backups on the news partitions?

[always the contrarian]

we backup our newspool and newslib just like most other partitions (on
a daily/weekly/monthly schedule).  however newspool and newslib live on
different partitions so there is the option of just doing newslib.

if you should chance to run certain backup programs on a newspool while
expire is running the resulting image may well be of little value.

why do i do this?  in the grand scheme of things a couple hundred meg
is not a big deal in our dumps and i think the problems we avoid
getting back up to speed are worth a few feet of tape.  however i do
have a large community of consumers.

-- 
pjg@acsu.buffalo.edu / rutgers!ub!pjg / pjg@ubvms (Bitnet)
opinions found above are mine unless marked otherwise.
Newsgroups: news.admin.misc,news.future,news.software.readers
From: kherron@ms.uky.edu (Kenneth Herron)
Subject: Re: NetNews, a blueprint for survival
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 1993 15:02:16 GMT
Organization: University Of Kentucky, Dept. of Math Sciences

toad@cellar.org (Tony Shepps) writes:

>alain@elevia.uniforum.qc.ca (W. A. Simon) writes:
>(A solid article on allowing sites to tell their feeds what they'd like
>to receive, automatically)

>...I have to ask: why hasn't this already happened?

>Is it because the folks who write and maintain most of the news freeware
>hang out at big, fully Internetted sites, and thus don't have to worry about
>ugly UUCP connections for small tight-budget sites that have to maintain
>their net status carefully?

Well, this big, fully Internetted site has been running a dynafeed
server for close to a year, and has released a set of perl scripts to
make it easier to administer.  We feed four "small tight-budget sites"
(only one of which is submitting subscription requests, sigh) and four
internet sites which only wanted partial feeds.  It works like a champ;
it takes less than a minute each 1/2 hour to service each site.
-- 
Kenneth Herron                                            kherron@ms.uky.edu
University of Kentucky                                       +1 606 257 2975
Dept. of Mathematics "Your ball goes over them, it sails off the edge into a
huge cauldren of fire-breathing dragons."  "And they call this a par three?"
Newsgroups: news.admin.misc,news.admin.policy,biz.config
From: jmorrill@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (John M Morrill)
Subject: Re: looking for company selling Usenet on CD-ROM
Keywords: Usenet,CD-ROM
Organization: The Ohio State University
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1993 15:19:50 GMT

.





In article <_0929q+@rpi.edu> aultj@jacob.its.rpi.edu (Jim Ault) writes:
>I remember a big discussion a while ago about a business that was selling
>Usenet articles stored over a period of time on CD-ROM.  Can someone tell
>me how to get in contact with that business?  Reply by email, please.
>Thanks.
>--
>Jim Ault, ITS Systems Programmer, aultj@rpi.edu    <><

I would also be interest in knowing which company is doing this. Please
send a copy of your reply to: jmorrill@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu
-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Strange problems call for strange solutions.
Xref: sparky news.admin.misc:1079 news.announce.newgroups:1509
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Stale & Trn
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 17:35:53 GMT
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

In article <1993Jan7.170102.1835@dunix.drake.edu> ta2321s@dunix.drake.edu (Terry Asher alias -       The Penguin) writes:
>... I am our news administrator at Drake University and am fairly new
>to c-news.  We get our feed from news.iastate.edu and I have talked with them
>and they assured me that this next error was not their fault.  We checked to
>see if it was a clock-sync problem between our two systems and our system time
>wasn't off by more than a minute from their time.  They have the May, 1992
>version of c-news.
>
>    The first error is in root's mail which reads as follows:
>      leading five sites sending stale/future/misdated news:
>      249 news.iastate.edu
>The number above changes constantly; going up and down.

That message is derived from log messages which indicate one of three
things:
	1. news older than your history-retention time
	2. news dated in the future
	3. news with garbage dates

For #1, you need to check the /expired/ value in your explist file and
see whether it's a reasonable number -- it should be at least a few days.
For the others, you need to look at the logs to locate specific messages,
and examine them to find out what's wrong.
-- 
"God willing... we shall return."       | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
       -Gene Cernan, the Moon, Dec 1972 |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry
Newsgroups: news.admin.misc
From: jgd@dixie.com (John De Armond)
Subject: Re: What son-of-rfc-1036 should say about "Distribution: "
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 93 06:16:31 GMT
Organization: Dixie Communications Public Access.  The Mouth of the South.

urlichs@smurf.sub.org (Matthias Urlichs) writes:

>> >Unfortunately Dynafeed has its own problems.  Like being difficult to
>> >configure.  Like being difficult to install.  Like being buggy.
>> 
>> Difficult to install without RFTSC, I agree, which is probably its greatest
>> flaw.  Otherwise, no problems here.
>> 
>You obviously never had your /usr/lib/news (or whatever) partition run full
>when dynafeed decided to do some work.

You're right, I've never had that happen.  That's because I wrote a
daemon that watches the designated disk partition and takes proactive
actions when space or inodes get short.  The program is called 
ichk and was posted to comp.sources.misc a year or so ago.

Philosophically, I'd rather have one program whose job is to keep
things off the edge of the envelope than to have to try and make
every piece of software I use absolutely stable on the boundaries.

John
-- 
John De Armond, WD4OQC               |Interested in high performance mobility?  
Performance Engineering Magazine(TM) | Interested in high tech and computers? 
Marietta, Ga                         | Send ur snail-mail address to 
jgd@dixie.com                        | perform@dixie.com for a free sample mag
Need Usenet public Access in Atlanta?  Write Me for info on Dixie.com.
From: anselmo@nic.near.net (Ed Anselmo)
Newsgroups: news.admin.misc
Subject: Re: What new innovation, software or products do you want to see?
Date: 5 Jan 1993 10:20:28 -0500
Organization: NEARnet, Cambridge, MA
	<1993Jan5.071610.3011@netcom.com>
	<1993Jan5.080948.15155@monu6.cc.monash.edu.au>
NNTP-Posting-Host: nic.near.net
In-reply-to: anthony@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au's message of Tue, 5 Jan 1993 08:09:48 GMT

[Old news admin habits die hard...]

The alt.test / misc.test ones were probably forgeries from
zoo-gw.cs.yale.edu, aka suned.zoo.cs.yale.edu, the Yale CS undergrad
server machine, posted to news.yale.edu, a campus news machine that's
basically on auto-pilot.

"news.yale.edu" has no non-Yale feeds; "gumby" talks to "yale", not
"news.yale.edu."
Xref: sparky news.admin.misc:1099 news.future:921 news.groups:25429 news.misc:2135 news.software.readers:2780 news.sysadmin:1602
From: dhd@exnet.co.uk (Damon)
Newsgroups: news.admin.misc
Subject: Re: backups on the news partition
Date: 10 Jan 93 21:27:47 GMT
Organization: ExNet Systems Ltd Public Access News, London, UK

In article <1inq8eINN8p3@spock.dis.cccd.edu> markb@spock.dis.cccd.edu (Mark Bixby) writes:
>Here we never back up the news article spool partition.  Keeps the backups
>small (a single unattended DAT) & faster.  If we ever lost the device, it would
>be no big deal to start over again with an empty spool.
>
>Of course, we DO back up the news programs and config files such as active,
>history, etc.

Here we only back up the news spool (in its own partition) with the
monthly level-0 dump.  Just on the principle that *everything* should
go in a level-0 dump methinks.

Damon
-- 
Damon Hart-Davis        London, UK        Internet: dhd@exnet.co.uk, d@hd.org

Public-access UNIX (Suns), news and mail for UK#5 per month.  FIRST MONTH FREE.
[1.36] Cheap Sun eqpt.  UUCP news/mail feeds.  Tel/Fax: +44 81 755 0077.
Newsgroups: news.admin.misc,news.future,news.misc
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: NetNews, a blueprint for survival
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1993 03:15:45 GMT
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

In article <47e4wB4w164w@cellar.org> toad@cellar.org (Tony Shepps) writes:
>(A solid article on allowing sites to tell their feeds what they'd like
>to receive, automatically)
>
>...and I couldn't agree more.  It makes an awful lot of common sense.  But I
>have to ask: why hasn't this already happened?
>
>Is it because the folks who write and maintain most of the news freeware
>hang out at big, fully Internetted sites, and thus don't have to worry about
>ugly UUCP connections for small tight-budget sites that have to maintain
>their net status carefully?

Roughly, yes.  We used to hang out at big, fully UUCPed sites, so it's
not Internet chauvinism.  A more accurate characterization is that we
tend to hang out at sites that are major relay nodes rather than leaf
nodes.  This does mean we lack perspective on the needs of small leaf
sites that aren't responsible for passing news on to anyone else and
hence can pick and choose group-by-group.

>It would be an ironic shame if the anarchistic nature of the net created a
>situation where only the big guys could survive.  We little guys are
>fighting for our lives in the trenches.

Um, you should bear in mind that very few of the freeware authors get
paid for news work.  You too can join the illustrious ranks; all you
have to do is give up sleeping :-(.  There's a very old saying in the
freeware world:  "if you care about it so much, why don't *you* fix it?".
(The usual answer, I'm afraid, is "because it's a lot of work and just
complaining is a lot easier".)

>Every time our feed site goes away
>for days on end, I feel like running a public access site is a losing
>battle...

You don't have redundant feeds?  We certainly did, back when we were
a UUCP-only site.  (Admittedly, it was less load on the modems then.)
-- 
"God willing... we shall return."       | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
       -Gene Cernan, the Moon, Dec 1972 |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry
Xref: sparky news.admin.misc:1072 news.announce.newusers:261 news.software.readers:2755 news.software.b:3747 news.answers:5132
From: anthony@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au (Anthony Baxter)
Subject: Re: What new innovation, software or products do you want to see?
Keywords: clueless, utterly clueless
Organization: Monash University, Melb., Australia.
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 08:09:48 GMT

In <1993Jan5.071610.3011@netcom.com> tweek@netcom.com (Michael D. Maxfield) writes:

>His Busy Little Beaver software was awfully busy...  I really like the
>alt.bitch.pork myself.   
> 
>Article 197868 (7 more) in junk:
>Newsgroups: alt.bitch.pork
>Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 01:26:40 GMT

Hmm, well, according to the files here, it's in 230+ newsgroups, with only
one copy crossposted (to alt.test and misc.test). However, looking at the
headers, the alt.test and misc.test one is actually a forgery through yale -
someone obviously decided to give him some more mail.

Anthony


-- 
           anthony baxter                  rdt : anthony@rdt.monash.edu.au.
 gaunix : anthony@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au.  work : anthony@aaii.oz.au
     digital technology  /  general access unix group  /  a a i i
           monash university     melbourne,  australia
Newsgroups: news.admin.misc
From: jgd@dixie.com (John De Armond)
Subject: Re: What son-of-rfc-1036 should say about "Distribution: "
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 93 22:15:57 GMT
Organization: Dixie Communications Public Access.  The Mouth of the South.

mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us (Marc Unangst) writes:

>Unfortunately Dynafeed has its own problems.  Like being difficult to
>configure.  Like being difficult to install.  Like being buggy.

Difficult to install without RFTSC, I agree, which is probably its greatest
flaw.  Otherwise, no problems here.

>files.  I am currently working on a replacement that rewrites the
>site's newsfeeds file entry, instead of trying to do the news feeding
>itself.

If you mean you're going to write a sys file, at least in pre-preformance
release of Cnews, you'll break it Cnews bad.  When a single system's
sys file entry gets to be over about 20 lines long, something in 
Cnews calls AWK which blorfs on that long a line.  Making a sys file
entry that will break Cnews will be trivial in a dynafeed-like environment.

Besides, I don't understand why you'd want to do that.  determining
which files to put in ~site/to.go is pretty trivial.  Dynafeed
seems to do it well.

John

-- 
John De Armond, WD4OQC               |Interested in high performance mobility?  
Performance Engineering Magazine(TM) | Interested in high tech and computers? 
Marietta, Ga                         | Send ur snail-mail address to 
jgd@dixie.com                        | perform@dixie.com for a free sample mag
Need Usenet public Access in Atlanta?  Write Me for info on Dixie.com.
From: markb@spock.dis.cccd.edu (Mark Bixby)
Newsgroups: news.admin.misc
Subject: How to cmsg sendsys to neighbors, but not to world?
Date: 8 Jan 1993 17:03:02 -0800
Organization: Coast Community College District, Costa Mesa, CA
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: spock.dis.cccd.edu
Summary: I'm so confused

How do I send a sendsys control message to my neighboring feeds without
having the sendsys sent to the entire world?  Is there a magic Distribution:
that will do the trick, or a special Newsgroup:?

Yes, I know I could just ask my neighboring news admins for the info, but I
want to learn more about how control messages are propagated and executed.

If it matters, I'm using INN 1.2.

Thanks.
-- 
Mark Bixby                         Internet: markb@cccd.edu
Coast Community College District   1370 Adams Avenue
District Information Services      Costa Mesa, CA, USA  92626
Technical Support                  (714) 432-5064
"You can tune a file system, but you can't tune a fish." - tunefs(1M)
From: clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Chris Lewis)
Newsgroups: news.admin.misc
Subject: Re: Paths with domains
Date: 10 Jan 93 04:44:13 GMT
Organization: Elegant Communications Inc., Ottawa, Canada

In article <C0JqLz.MAC@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
|In article <721@rescon.UUCP> bud@rescon.UUCP (Alex Batyi) writes:
|>... 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).

Not quite, but close.  B news can handle it.

|In C News, your sys file entry would start "king/king.mcs.drexel.edu:"
|instead of just "king:", to say "his name is king, but by the way, don't
|send him anything that seems to have passed through king.mcs.drexel.edu".
|Try it, maybe it'll work...

The above won't work in B news.  B news never understood "/" in site or
newsgroup fields.

|Alternatively, you could list him as king.mcs.drexel.edu in the sys file
|but specify an explicit file name (i.e. don't leave the last field empty)
|to direct output to a file named .../king instead of .../k.m.d.e.

This will work fine with B news.  Ie:

	king.mcs.drexel.edu:.....:F:/usr/spool/batch/king
-- 
Chris Lewis; clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca; Phone: Canada 613 832-0541
Psroff 3.0 info: psroff-request@ferret.ocunix.on.ca
Ferret list: ferret-request@ferret.ocunix.on.ca
Xref: sparky news.admin.misc:1001 news.software.b:3706 news.software.nntp:1747
From: rsalz@rodan.UU.NET (Rich Salz)
Newsgroups: news.admin.misc,news.software.b,news.software.nntp
Subject: Re: "Official" distributions file for INN?
Date: 7 Jan 1993 10:56:07 -0500
Organization: UUNET Technologies Inc, Falls Church, VA
Distribution: inet
NNTP-Posting-Host: rodan.uu.net

In <1ifq44INN62a@spock.dis.cccd.edu> markb@spock.dis.cccd.edu (Mark Bixby) writes:
>Is there any authoritative list of distributions deemed valid by the Usenet
>community?
No.  Some guy, wndrsvr!andyb, maintained a posting of common ones for
a few months but I haven't seen anything in a while from him.


>  There's the standard stuff like world,usa,na etc, plus regionals
                                   ^^^^^
Not really a valid distribution.  World was a hack introduced by B News
to mean "in the absence of any distribution".  (Now it's a hack populated
by Geoff :-)
	/r$
Xref: sparky news.admin.misc:1028 news.future:902 news.groups:25242 news.misc:2106 news.software.readers:2727 news.sysadmin:1596
Newsgroups: news.admin.misc,news.future,news.groups,news.misc,news.software.readers,news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: NetNews, a blueprint for survival
From: toad@cellar.org (Tony Shepps)
Date: 9 Jan 93 04:48:14 GMT
Organization: The Cellar BBS and public access system

alain@elevia.uniforum.qc.ca (W. A. Simon) writes:

(A solid article on allowing sites to tell their feeds what they'd like
to receive, automatically)

...and I couldn't agree more.  It makes an awful lot of common sense.  But I
have to ask: why hasn't this already happened?

Is it because the folks who write and maintain most of the news freeware
hang out at big, fully Internetted sites, and thus don't have to worry about
ugly UUCP connections for small tight-budget sites that have to maintain
their net status carefully?

It would be an ironic shame if the anarchistic nature of the net created a
situation where only the big guys could survive.  We little guys are
fighting for our lives in the trenches.  Every time our feed site goes away
for days on end, I feel like running a public access site is a losing
battle.  The only real solution in site is to find investment money and go
Internet/commercial.

--
Tony Shepps  toad@cellar.org
The Cellar: Public access and thoughtful conversation  +1 215 539 3043
Newsgroups: news.admin.misc
From: brad@clarinet.com (Brad Templeton)
Subject: Re: What son-of-rfc-1036 should say about "Distribution: "
Organization: ClariNet Communications Corp.
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1993 04:34:41 GMT

In article <1ino68INN53r@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us> mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us (Marc Unangst) writes:
>I tried using Dynafeed for several months.  I eventually gave up on it
>because it was regularly taking the "control" group out of the newsrc
>file, despite insertions of ": control" in several different config
>files.  I am currently working on a replacement that rewrites the
>site's newsfeeds file entry, instead of trying to do the news feeding
>itself.
I never got this problem -- do you have any info on how to duplicate it?

As to the other criticisms, it is hard to install because it doesn't have
a nice auto-installer, but I think it's easy to configure because it's
built with shell scripts and a series of tools, so you can add your own
filtering wherever you like.  But you have to learn what the tools are.
-- 
Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Sunnyvale, CA 408/296-0366
Newsgroups: news.admin.misc,news.future,news.groups,news.misc,news.software.readers,news.sysadmin
From: larry@news.rn.com (Larry Snyder)
Subject: Re: NetNews, a blueprint for survival
Organization: Gator Communications - Feeds-R-Us 219-289-3745 
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 22:29:38 GMT

len@netsys.com (Len Rose) writes:

>Now Pagesat is feeding 56 simultaneous feeds, 24 hours a day 7 days a week
>via GE's K2 satellite. 

How often do you batch for these sites?

>When we release the Windows 3.1 software , you'll no longer need a Unix system
>and countless hours of administration to be on the net. The price of admission
>has dropped.

How does this software handle outbound traffic?

And what are you sending on the spare bandwidth (ie: any software?)

-- 
Larry Snyder                                    internet: larry@gator.use.com
keeper of the Gator                                   uucp: uunet!gator!larry
Xref: sparky news.admin.misc:996 news.software.b:3703 news.software.nntp:1745
From: markb@spock.dis.cccd.edu (Mark Bixby)
Newsgroups: news.admin.misc,news.software.b,news.software.nntp
Subject: "Official" distributions file for INN?
Date: 6 Jan 93 23:31:16 GMT
Organization: Coast Community College District, Costa Mesa, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: spock.dis.cccd.edu

I want to be a good newsadmin and help stamp out invalid distributions. ;-)
So I've specified those distributions I consider valid in the ME entry of my
newsfeeds file.  For lack of any authoritative reference, this currently
consists of everything my feed sites consider valid, plus our organization's
internal distributions.

Is there any authoritative list of distributions deemed valid by the Usenet
community?  There's the standard stuff like world,usa,na etc, plus regionals
like ba,la,oc, plus frowned-upon ones like comp,rec,sci.  I poked around on
ftp.uu.net but couldn't find any official list.

Since the philosophy of INN (in docs and article threads) seems to encourage
rigorous distribution checking, it would be nice if somebody somewhere kept
an official list of distributions.
-- 
Mark Bixby                         Internet: markb@cccd.edu
Coast Community College District   1370 Adams Avenue
District Information Services      Costa Mesa, CA, USA  92626
Technical Support                  (714) 432-5064
"You can tune a file system, but you can't tune a fish." - tunefs(1M)