HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: mark@sgcs.com (Mark W. Snitily)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: C-news on Unix V.3.2 ... is it possible at all?
Date: 12 Dec 92 02:07:45 GMT
Organization: SGCS, Cupertino

[This is my first followup since installing C news, so... have no idea if
this'll work...]

In article <372@apdnmi.idca.tds.philips.nl> faas@idca.tds.philips.nl (Everhard Faas) writes:
>Did anyone succeed in patching the c-news source to put news-articles
>with cross-postings on separate filesystems?

Yes.  The patches posted by John R. Levine (johnl@iecc.cambridge.ma.us)
work great with the May-92 performance release.  He posted the patches to
comp.unix.sysv386, alt.sources and comp.unix.pc-clone.32bit on 19-Oct-92.  
Though his changes were based upon the 22-Dec-1991 version of C news
they apply to the May-92 version with almost no modifications.  Patch
failed in 2 or 3 places because the code was trivially changed.  It was
very easy to figure out the corrections to these patch failures.

If it is of interest, I could post the patches relative to the May-92
release.

-- Mark

Mark W. Snitily       SGCS, 894 Brookgrove Lane, Cupertino, CA 95014-4634
mark@sgcs.com         (408) 255-9665   FAX: (408) 255-9740
...!sgiblab!zok!mark  West Coast UUCP X11 archive site
Xref: sparky news.software.b:3563 news.software.nntp:1692 news.software.readers:2502
From: kenh@leps5.phys.psu.edu (Ken Hornstein)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.software.nntp,news.software.readers
Subject: Re: INN newbie has innd, nnrpd, trn interaction questions
Date: 17 Dec 92 20:20:14 GMT
Organization: Penn State, Laboratory for Elementary Particle Science

In article <1gqdsgINNom1@rodan.UU.NET> rsalz@rodan.UU.NET (Rich Salz) writes:
>INN includes the NNTP1.5 'clientlib' API, built on top of the INN routines
>documented in libinn.3.  I have built rn with them.  I have never built trn,
>but as long as it doesn't stray outside the clientlib set, it should be
>possible to edit trn/Makefile so that it links with libinn.a before 
>the NNTP clinetlib.

That's the problem.  If you want to build trn with the ability to read the
threads via NNTP, it wants a few extra routines in the clientlib (those are
provided by the patches in the trn/nntp directory).  Maybe if I get time I will
try to massage the trn patches into INN's clientlib.  (Or has anyone else done
this? :-) )

--Ken
From: rob@agate.berkeley.edu (Rob Robertson)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: This UUCP site runs INN
Date: 20 Dec 92 15:28:02
Organization: University of California, Bezerkeley
	<1992Dec18.135727.4601@sonyd1.Broadcast.Sony.COM>
	<1gv12mINNcpm@grasp1.univ-lyon1.fr> <1gvld4INNpkt@smurf.smurf.sub.org>
NNTP-Posting-Host: hanalei.berkeley.edu
In-reply-to: urlichs@smurf.sub.org's message of 19 Dec 1992 18:16:20 +0100


just a note on innd's memory useage:  it is possible to NOT have the
history database incore, by just commenting out dbzincore(1) in
innd/his.c.  this will keep your innd fairly memory lean, and won't
affect one too adversely if you have just one or two newsfeeds.

by not keeping the history.pag file incore, your just adding a few
disk seeks & reads per article.  it seems to work for cnews.

rob
--
			  william robertson
			rob@agate.berkeley.edu

     "when i was your age, i walked 10 miles to school, unarmed."
From: notes@hprnd.rose.hp.com (Notes Administrator)
Subject: Re: how can I have private newsgroups?
Date: Sat, 19 Dec 1992 00:17:59 GMT
Organization: HP - Systems Technology Division
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1.8 PL6]

Is there any way to modify nntp_access or anything else I can do to make a
group even more private - say by user name?  I'm converting some Notes users
over to News and they are in need of limiting access to a "private" group 
by user and not just by system name.

Thanks for any tips,

Sherri Cornejo
Roseville, CA
sherric@hprpcd.rose.hp.com
From: urlichs@smurf.sub.org (Matthias Urlichs)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: What is the advantage of INN over CNews?
Date: 15 Dec 1992 20:42:02 +0100
Organization: University of Karlsruhe, FRG
NNTP-Posting-Host: 127.0.0.1
Keywords: inn cnews

In news.software.b, article <1992Dec15.175743.9862@dragon.acadiau.ca>,
  peter@dragon.acadiau.ca (Peter Steele) writes:
> 
> So, if we get our news via a single 56K baud line, we shouldn't
> consider INN? Does our feader site also need INN running, or is
Yes you should. ;-)

> it independent of what the feeder site uses. Right now we're running
It's standard NNTP. Thus, feeder-independent.

> cnews and get our news in batches via nntpsend every 20 minutes.
> 
I'm hanging off a 16.8k line (the wonders of Zyxel ;-) and get a continuous
feed via nntplink.

> On another note, INN *must* have more going for it than just what
> is described above. What other reasons might make it worthwhile to
> switch to INN.

Lots.
- Central control.If you say "ctlinnd mode" and "running" comes back, then
  you know your News system is up and OK, no further questions necessary.
- No lock files. The daemon remembers its state.
- Direct posting. As soon as inews returns, you know your article entered the
  News system and was spooled to other sites.
- More than one concurrent incoming feed. (Right now, I've got two rnews
  jobs, two incoming NNTP feeds, and an inews active. They don't block one
  another and all get instant and reliable feedback on the articles they
  deliver.)
- Reworked "newsfeeds" (nee sys) file with much finer control as to what
  actually gets written to batch files.
- Directly feed the batch into a program, via pipe. People have been seeing
  article transfer times on the order of 200 msec, using this method to feed
  another system via nntplink.
- Combine the previous two to do some really ugly things like statistics
  gathering or sendsys-bomb cancelling. Especially the latter isn't really
  doable, given the above subsecond transfer times, unless you can get the
  Cancel into your news server _right_now_.
- One INN system can mirror another INN system. No more problems with
  renumbered articles -> instant switchover when the primary server fails
  and/or when it is temporarily overworked.
- Doubtless some other things I've forgotten.

-- 
Matthias Urlichs  --  urlichs@smurf.sub.org -- urlichs@smurf.ira.uka.de   /(o\
Humboldtstrasse 7 -- 7500 Karlsruhe 1 -- Germany  --  +49-721-9612521     \o)/
Xref: sparky news.software.b:3556 comp.unix.aix:12641 comp.unix.questions:14765
From: usenet@rs6000.bham.ac.uk (USENET News Service)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,comp.unix.aix,comp.unix.questions
Subject: AIX3.1.5 problem with INN1.2
Date: 17 Dec 1992 15:43:54 -0000
Organization: The University of Birmingham, England
Reply-To: G.Simpson@bham.ac.uk
NNTP-Posting-Host: rs6000.bham.ac.uk
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL8]

IVe recently installed INN1.2 and found what appears to be a problem, and
wonder whether anyone else has seen this, and/or managed to get around it.

If i run /usr/local/news/bin/expire to expire articles, it runs through
ok, building a new history.n history file. When it is finished, the new
history file is copied to the old one, as you'd expect. The problem
arises when i do a 'df' command on the partition, and i find that
the space taken up by the two history files has not been reclaimed by
the system, consequently leaving me with little disk space. By shutting
down and restarting the server, the space becomes available. 

Anyone got any thoughts on this ??? I'll copy some config files if people
require onto these lists.

Thanks in advance

--
Glyn Simpson, Systems Officer,  //  Voice: +44 (0) 21 414 6575
University of Birmingham        //  Fax:   +44 (0) 21 414 3952
Email: G.Simpson@bham.ac.uk     //  NIC Handle: GS56
From: urlichs@smurf.sub.org (Matthias Urlichs)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: This UUCP site runs INN (was What is the advantage of INN over CNews?)
Date: 19 Dec 1992 14:03:02 +0100
Organization: University of Karlsruhe, FRG
NNTP-Posting-Host: 127.0.0.1

In news.software.b, article <1992Dec18.135727.4601@sonyd1.Broadcast.Sony.COM>,
  lilb@sony.compuserve.com (Bruce Lilly) writes:
> 
> Does innd have to be running continuously, or can it be run on an
> as-required basis from inetd (suitable for machines with low
> volume feeds and only occasional newsreader connections (nntpd
> can be run from inetd))?
> 
When innd is not active, it gets mostly paged out. So there shouldn't be any
performance degradation when innd is running and doing nothing.

On the other hand, innd startup takes a few CPU seconds (grab the history
file, scan the newsfeeds file, build all the in-core data structures).
Besides, inetd can't listen on UNIX-domain sockets and innd doesn't have a
way to pass an open file descriptor in (other than the TCP listener socket,
which can only be opened as root under most Unixes).

> What other underlying assumptions and requirements exist for
> INN? For example, somebody else claimed that because INN can
> write to a pipe rather than to a disk file, it's performance can
> be better than C news'.  That assumes that a pipe is
> fundamentally different from a disk file, which is certainly not
> the case for many varieties of the UNIX(R) operating system.

Umm, that depends on what you regard as "fundamentally different".
Read/write froma pipe usually doesn't hit the disk at all, you don't
have to scan a directory and open/close a file every time the reader
catches up with the writer, you can't call select() on a disk file...

> Aside from a socket emulation library, what does INN require
> (does it require BSD-hacked signal(3) calls, e.g.)?
> 
INN doesn't really depend on signals. It uses them to catch SIGC(H)LD and
SIGPIPE, to find out when a piped-to process dies or closes its stdin,
and to shut down gracefully when it gets SIGINT or SIGTERM.
None of these depend on BSD signal semantics.

-- 
The clothes have no emperor.
- C. A. Hoare, about Ada.
-- 
Matthias Urlichs  --  urlichs@smurf.sub.org -- urlichs@smurf.ira.uka.de   /(o\
Humboldtstrasse 7 -- 7500 Karlsruhe 1 -- Germany  --  +49-721-9612521     \o)/
From: kenh@leps5.phys.psu.edu (Ken Hornstein)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Multi-FS news spool layout question
Date: 17 Dec 1992 01:32:24 GMT
Organization: Penn State, Laboratory for Elementary Particle Science

In article <1gofqvINNee@milk.Warren.MENTORG.COM> tal@Warren.MENTORG.COM (Tom Limoncelli) writes:
>In article <1gli95INNid5@cat.cis.Brown.EDU> JIM@brownvm.brown.edu (James Mathiesen) writes:
>
>>A more elegent solution is to let dbz() have a write-through cache,
>>this lets .pag be kept in memory, but updates are written to disk
>>as they occur.  I'm enclosing patches below to dbz.c, dbz.h and
>>his.c that add and use dbzwritethough().
>
>Excuse my ignorance, but would it be better if the history.pag file was
>mmap()'ed?  that way, a simple fsync() call would write out just the
>changes rather than the entire file.

Yes, it would.  Unfortunately, under Ultrix (which I believe what the original
poster was talking about), you can only mmap() a character device.  *sigh*

--Ken
Xref: sparky news.software.b:3571 news.sysadmin:1573 news.software.readers:2512 news.admin.misc:839
From: andrew@calvin.dgbt.doc.ca (Andrew Patrick)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.sysadmin,news.software.readers,news.admin.misc
Subject: how can I have private newsgroups?
Keywords: private newsgroups news
Date: 18 Dec 92 16:29:51 GMT
Followup-To: news.software.b
Organization: Communications Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada

Is there a way for me to have private local newsgroups?

That is, I have a list of users and they should be the only ones who
can read and post to this newsgroup.  Better yet, no one else should
even know about this newsgroup.

I am using C-News and various news readers.

-- 
Andrew Patrick, Ph.D.       Communications Research Centre, Ottawa, CANADA
                       andrew@calvin.dgbt.doc.CA
                       
  For a good time, run "telnet debra.dgbt.doc.ca" and login as "chat".
From: tal@Warren.MENTORG.COM (Tom Limoncelli)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: inn - 'cant nonblock 16 Invalid argument'
Date: 14 Dec 1992 15:37:28 -0500
Organization: Mentor Graphics -- IC Group
NNTP-Posting-Host: milk.warren.mentorg.com

In <1992Dec12.135539.28843@eua.ericsson.se> per@erix.ericsson.se (Per Hedeland) writes:

>In article <1gb1usINN5e2@milk.Warren.MENTORG.COM> tal@Warren.MENTORG.COM (Tom Limoncelli) writes:

>I certainly agree that the news transport shouldn't access the spool via
>NFS - but why does INN try to to do an FIONBIO on a *file*?  Surely it
>wouldn't be very expensive to precede it with an fstat, or perhaps
>follow the failed FIONBIO with one, or just remember that it is a file
>since the opening...?

You have access to the source.  Make those changes.  If it works, post
the patches and the world will be a better place.  If it doesn't work
you'll have learned something.

Tom, who avoids programming during December.
-- 
Tom Limoncelli -- tal@warren.mentorg.com (work) -- tal@plts.uucp (play)
Reality is stranger than fiction #943247:  The IRS granted
ANS approval as a 501c3 "charity" on September 14, 1992.
From: rsalz@rodan.UU.NET (Rich Salz)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Multi-FS news spool layout question
Date: 17 Dec 1992 12:46:56 -0500
Organization: UUNET Technologies Inc, Falls Church, VA
NNTP-Posting-Host: rodan.uu.net

In <1gog3hINNfm@milk.Warren.MENTORG.COM> tal@Warren.MENTORG.COM (Tom Limoncelli) writes:
>  I know this would add a lot of state, but
>has Rich considered adding code to INN to group history appends, but
>not ACK'ing the NNTP feeds until the multi-append is complete?
Some folks at LBL have some ideas on how to do this kind of streaming so
that protocol turn-arounds are minimized.

NNTPv2 has similar functionality, but as you might expect, the LBL idea
gets 98% of the benefit at 5% of the cost.  If we all ever get the time,
it will show up in INN.
	/r$
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: CNEWS or BNEWS (was Re: CNEWS or BNEWS on Xenix)
Date: Sat, 19 Dec 1992 23:40:51 GMT
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

In article <4221@datasci.co.uk> tgll@datasci.co.uk (Tim Lyons) writes:
>I have tried to ask one or two questions about Bnews, on one or two
>different newsgroups, but I have only ever got one reply (thanks whoever
>it was), and that said I should switch to Cnews (or INN).
>
>In fact, I can't even find a newsgroup where Bnews is ever discussed, so
>if anyone can suggest a better place to ask I would be grateful...

You are pretty much out of luck, I'm afraid.  This is the place.  But
B News is so obsolete that you won't be able to get much help with it.
The sort of attentive, knowledgeable people who might be able to help
are exactly the ones who, by and large, abandoned B News long ago.

>Can anyone give me any advice on switching from Bnews to Cnews?  Are
>there any particular problems or issues I should look out for?

There's a whole document on the subject in the current C News distribution.
The main thing to be aware of is that the administrative interfaces have
changed, so you'd have some relearning to do.
-- 
"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.software.b:3558 news.software.nntp:1690 news.software.readers:2499
From: rsalz@rodan.UU.NET (Rich Salz)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.software.nntp,news.software.readers
Subject: Re: INN newbie has innd, nnrpd, trn interaction questions
Date: 17 Dec 1992 12:37:20 -0500
Organization: UUNET Technologies Inc, Falls Church, VA
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: rodan.uu.net

In <1gof2bINNpi1@spock.dis.cccd.edu> markb@spock.dis.cccd.edu (Mark Bixby) writes:
>Trn 2.2 shouldn't be too hard to patch to try a "mode reader" command after
>connection;
It is trivial.  Look at lib/clientlib.c in the INN distribution.

INN includes the NNTP1.5 'clientlib' API, built on top of the INN routines
documented in libinn.3.  I have built rn with them.  I have never built trn,
but as long as it doesn't stray outside the clientlib set, it should be
possible to edit trn/Makefile so that it links with libinn.a before 
the NNTP clinetlib.
	/r$
From: tal@Warren.MENTORG.COM (Tom Limoncelli)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: inn - 'cant nonblock 16 Invalid argument'
Date: 11 Dec 1992 16:41:48 -0500
Organization: Mentor Graphics -- IC Group
NNTP-Posting-Host: milk.warren.mentorg.com

In <Bz3rA9.61r@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu> xcea@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu (Chad Adams) writes:

>I am installing INN 1.2 on SunOS 4.1.3.  I am getting many of these
>error messages in /var/log/news/news.err:

>Dec 11 04:10:08 news innd: ME cant nonblock 16 Invalid argument
[...]

Sounds like you're using an NFS mounted partition.  Bzzzt.

From the next rev (please don't email me and ask for it) of my
unofficial INN FAQ:

-----------------------

### What does this mean:
### 
### Dec  2 20:40:04 venus innd: ME cant nonblock 15 Operation not supported

Answer: (from paulr@umbc4.umbc.edu (Paul Riddle))

It turns out that this is happening because /usr/spool/news on the
machine running innd is an NFS-mounted filesystem, and innd is trying
to do an FIONBIO on my feed file, which is under /usr/spool/news/out.going.

(tal@warren.mentorg.com adds:)
All news transports (INN, C news, B news) want the spool partition to
be local.  Newsreader can read from an NFS mounted partition without
any problems but innd should only see local partitions.  NFS has a blantant
disreguard for many of the file semantics that are needed for a good news
implementation.  If you don't agree, please feel free to prove the authors
of B news, C news, TMNNN (?), and INN wrong.  Include source code.

-----------------------
-- 
Tom Limoncelli -- tal@warren.mentorg.com (work) -- tal@plts.uucp (play)
Reality is stranger than fiction #943247:  The IRS granted
ANS approval as a 501c3 "charity" on September 14, 1992.
From: rsalz@rodan.UU.NET (Rich Salz)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: inn's newsfeeds file
Date: 18 Dec 1992 16:10:47 -0500
Organization: UUNET Technologies Inc, Falls Church, VA
NNTP-Posting-Host: rodan.uu.net

In <BzGz3I.8D8@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu> xcea@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu (Chad Adams) writes:
>uchinews1\
>        :!nptn.*,!clari.*,!chi.*,!to.*,!bgu.*/chi,il\
>        :Wfm:
>What I want the above line to do is send everything not in the above !ed
>groups that had a distribution of chi or il.  What it does is ether send
>all distributions or articles with no distribution header.
The above sends articles either without a Distribution header, or with
one that has chi or il.  If you want only chi or il distributions, use
Change "Wfm" to "Wfm,Ad".  The "Ad" part says "if an article is to be
forwarded it must have a Distribution header."
	/r$
From: urlichs@smurf.sub.org (Matthias Urlichs)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Multi-FS news spool layout question
Date: 16 Dec 1992 23:59:47 +0100
Organization: University of Karlsruhe, FRG
NNTP-Posting-Host: 127.0.0.1

In news.software.b, article <1gli95INNid5@cat.cis.Brown.EDU>,
  JIM@brownvm.brown.edu (James Mathiesen) writes:
> You may have the same gottcha we found last week.  (We run INN 1.2 on Ultrix
> 4.2 with two RZ58 drives, so we have pretty similar systems)
> 
Ah. We switched from that to a SPARCish server with nice, big, fast SCSI
drives a few weeks ago.

> Our symptoms were a machine that froze at random intervals for
> up to 20 seconds with innd in disk-wait.
> 
> In our case the problem was the interaction between dbz and innd.
> innd calls dbzincore() to keep the history.pag index in memory.
> After every 10 updates of the .pag file, innd calls dbzsync() to
> update the .pag on disk.  The problem is that dbzsync simply
> writes the entire 6 meg .pag file out -- about 100 times an hour.
> No wonder the disk was busy all the time...
> 
The 10-updates stuff seems to me slightly excessive. I have changed the
number to 500 (ICD_SYNC_COUNT in config/config.data) on our systems.
(If there's a crash, we run expire -ln before restarting innd.)

> A more elegent solution is to let dbz() have a write-through cache,
> this lets .pag be kept in memory, but updates are written to disk
> as they occur.  I'm enclosing patches below to dbz.c, dbz.h and
> his.c that add and use dbzwritethough().
> 
Thanks.

-- 
Matthias Urlichs  --  urlichs@smurf.sub.org -- urlichs@smurf.ira.uka.de   /(o\
Humboldtstrasse 7 -- 7500 Karlsruhe 1 -- Germany  --  +49-721-9612521     \o)/
Newsgroups: news.software.b
From: jerry@austin.ibm.com (Jerry Heyman)
Subject: adding Lines: line to postings
Originator: jerry@dcheney.austin.ibm.com
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1992 00:15:02 GMT
Reply-To: jerry@austin.ibm.com
Organization: IBM AIX AWSD Austin, TX
Keywords: Lines:


My user community would very much like to have the Lines: line generated
in their article postings.  I've located the shell script that adds that
to the header, but I now have a question.

/usr/lib/newsbin/inject/pnews has a comment about the lines script.  It
basically says that you should uncomment Line A if you insist on having it,
and then comment out Line B.  This seems to be a relatively easy concept
until you see that Line B is really several lines.  I assume that I would
need to comment out all those lines marked line B.

Now for the harder question.  It seems that the lines shell script sed's
the .signature file if it exists.  My knowledge of sed is truly limited, and
in reading pnews AFTER the line B lines, it also does some sed'ing with the
.signature file.  I obviously don't want to wind up with two .signatures at
the bottom of each post - do I comment out the sed'ing in pnews?

Thanks,

jerry
-- 
Jerry Heyman                         e-mail   : jerry@austin.ibm.com
IBM AWSD AIX Dev Env Tools MS 9631    "Software is the difference between
Austin, TX  78758                        hardware and reality"
*** All opinions expressed are exactly that - my opinions and NOT IBM's
From: smee@bristol.ac.uk (Paul Smee)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: What to do with files in incoming/bad
Date: 18 Dec 92 10:04:47 GMT
Reply-To: P.Smee@bristol.ac.uk (Paul Smee)
Organization: University of Bristol

In article <BzELqA.Kvq@sunlab1.bath.ac.uk> ccsis@sunlab1.bath.ac.uk (Icarus Sparry) writes:
>In the referenced article, P.Smee@bristol.ac.uk (Paul Smee) writes:
>>Second try:
>(edit the batch to remove the single bad article if possible).
>Good advice, but usually this will only get you one extra article, the
>one following the bad one, and only then if the bad article is shorter than
>its byte count in the #!rnews header implies.

This, by the way, is the cause of the 'unbatcher out of sync' that
someone else asked about recently.  Cnews looks at the '#! rnews <N>'
line to see how long the following message is.  It pulls out that many
characters as a 'message' to be processed.  It SHOULD then be at the
next such #! line.  If it looks up and discovers it is in the middle of
a 'message' instead, it has to throw stuff away until it finds such a
line, to resync itself.

-- 
Paul Smee, Computing Service, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1UD, UK
 P.Smee@bristol.ac.uk - ..!uunet!uknet!bsmail!p.smee - Tel +44 272 303132