HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: marsh@ARISTO.TAU.AC.IL (MARSHALL RAPAPORT)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Expire problems
Date: 26 Jul 92 06:39:56 GMT
Organization: Tel-Aviv University Computation Center

Hi,
  The last couple of days I've been getting the following messages:

expire problems:
expire: wrong number of fields in history `<BrpA34.J0G@usenet....'
expire: bad return from doline(): `<BrpA34.J0G@usenet.'

  Apparently I have some problem in my history file.  I'm running Cnews,
and would like to know what should be done.  I guess I can just run
mkhistory and hopefully this will solve the problem - but maybe somebody
out there has a less time consuming solution.  Thanks for any help.

                   Marshall Rapaport
                   email: marsh@aristo.tau.ac.il
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
From: ckd@eff.org (Christopher Davis)
Subject: Re: Cnews Performance
Organization: Electronic Frontier Foundation Tech Central
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1992 20:50:46 GMT

John> == John Stewart <jstewart@alfred.carleton.ca> 

 John> Assuming the machine is used primarily for news service, disk
 John> accesses to /usr/spool/news will greatly exceed all other disk io
 John> combined.  It would therefore be better to also put the OS on the
 John> new disk to reduce disk accesses on the old disk.

 John> On our machine we have 3 disks that are allocated as follows.

 John>    Disk 1   root file system, /usr and /usr/lib/newsbin
 John>    Disk 2   /usr/spool/news and some rarely accessed archives
 John>    Disk 3   /usr/lib/news, home directories and a few miscellaneous
 John>             things

 John> One more way to reduce your disk accesses is to mount /tmp as a tmpfs 
 John> (memory resident directory).

Agreed.  Our news/ftp/WAIS machine has four drives (it's a 32M SS2):

sd0: root, swap, /usr (including newsbin) [424 internal]
sd1: more swap, /var, /home (small, no users), /libnews, ftp and WAIS [1.3G]
sd2: /src, scratch (used for big builds like X11R5) [600M]
sd3: /news [1.3G]

The 600 is an old Wren something-or-other, not too slow, but not
blazing.  The 1.3s and 424 are Sun (the 1.3s are the Seagate Elites,
which are pretty zippy; the 424 is a Quantum, I think).  We use tmpfs.

Right now this sucker screams along with an ever-growing number of
nntplink news feeds, over 2K groups (including clarinet), heavy ftp
traffic, and some WAIS.  The load is usually about 1, almost always less
than 2; we do a newsrun every 5 minutes from cron, and run a pretty
stock 22-Dec (non-Performance-Release) C news.  No msgidd, no daemonized
relaynews, we haven't even patched C news to put the pathname in
/usr/lib/news/log, so nntplink is doing huge quantities of history
lookups.  Expire is nice and quick, too.  If the machine ever starts
gasping, it goes to 64M RAM; no signs of it, yet.

C news is no slouch.  I left news locked for a while (a couple hours, I
think) once as an unscientific test; the load went up to about 2.5 for
maybe 5 minutes before catching up with all the incoming news... big deal.

Again, this isn't even the Performance Release.
--
Christopher Davis * ckd@eff.org * System Administrator, EFF * +1 617 864 0665
   ``The First Amendment is often inconvenient.  But that is besides the
  point.  Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation
         to tolerate speech.'' --Justice Anthony Kennedy, in 91-155
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
From: wesommer@mit.edu (Bill Sommerfeld)
Subject: Re: Cnews Performance
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
	<CKD.92Jul21164839@loiosh.eff.org>
	<1992Jul21.211916.2919@odin.corp.sgi.com>
	<CKD.92Jul21215252@loiosh.eff.org>
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 1992 17:45:24 GMT

In article <CKD.92Jul21215252@loiosh.eff.org> ckd@eff.org (Christopher Davis) writes:

   Readers are the real load on most systems.

   (This is also why MIT has snorkelwacker to pump news, and bloom-beacon &
   bloom-picayune to support the readers... I bet there aren't too many
   users reading news off zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu, either.)

Actually, that's snork to pump news, beacon to do mail<->news and pump
a little news, and picayune to support the readers..

					- Bill


--
Xref: sparky news.sysadmin:1146 news.admin:6050 news.answers:2222 news.lists:332
From: gyro@kestrel.edu (Scott L. Burson)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: C news feed restriction not working?!
Date: 29 Jul 92 19:48:08 GMT
Organization: Kestrel Institute, Palo Alto, CA


Hello again,

I am having a problem with the UUCP feed I have set up to my machine
from kestrel.edu: even though, in the sys file on kestrel, I have
carefully listed only those groups I wish to receive, I seem to be
getting everything (6Mb arrived this morning).  I can't afford either
the phone bill or the disk space for a full feed.  Does anyone have
any guesses as to the problem?  The sys file line on kestrel reads:

zetasoft:ba,alt.astrology,alt.consciousness,alt.conspiracy,alt.magick,alt.pagan,alt.politics.bush,alt.politics.clinton,alt.politics.elections,alt.politics.homosexuality,alt.rave,alt.save.the.earth,alt.self-improve,alt.sexual.abuse.recovery,comp.ai,comp.binaries.mac,comp.binaries.ibm,comp.compilers,comp.lang,comp.mail.sendmail,comp.mail.uucp,comp.object,comp.os.cpm,comp.os.linux,comp.os.mach,comp.os.minix,comp.patents,comp.risks,comp.society,comp.software-eng,comp.sources.sun,comp.sources.unix,comp.sources.






x,comp.specification,comp.std.c++,comp.sys.ti,comp.sys.transputer,comp.theory,comp.unix.solaris,gnu,kestrel.bboard,kestrel.info-mac,kestrel.info-macl,kestrel.tcp-isdn,kestrel.theory,news,rec.audio,rec.autos,rec.music,rec.nude,rec.pets.cats,sci.cognitive,sci.energy,sci.environment,sci.philosophy,sci.physics,sci.psychology,soc.bi,soc.feminism,soc.men,soc.singles,to.zetasoft/all:f:

Thanks in advance
  -- Scott
     Gyro@ZETA-SOFT.COM
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
From: Ross Ridge <ross@zooid.guild.org>
Subject: Re: NNTP over slip or uucp?
Organization: ZOOiD BBS
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 1992 05:45:43 GMT

ross@zooid.guild.org (Ross Ridge) writes:
>The 'g' protocol has 64 byte packets, any TCP specific protocol I've
>seen has no packet size.

ian@airs.com (Ian Lance Taylor) writes:
>THe 't' protocol, which is intended for use over TCP, uses 1024 byte
>packets with a 4 byte overhead per packet.

Yah, I found that out almost immediately I posted that.  I also found
out that everyone uses 'e' protocol over TCP, and that everyone uses
't' protocol over TCP from someone else...

>>>  The 40/1020 overhead is under 4%.  I don't consider that "huge", do you?
>
>>40/64 seems very huge to me.
>
>I don't see any reason to assume that a single UUCP packet will become
>a single TCP packet...

What else is the kernel going to do with it after getting a "write(tcp_fd,
64, uucp_packet);"?  It could buffer it hoping that another write on the
TCP file descriptor will come soon, but likely it's just going to wrap a
TCP header around it, then an IP one around that, and then send it down the
SLIP link.  It's been a while since I've mucked around in kernal sources
(or UUCP sources), maybe I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem too unreasonable
an assumption to make.

>>I'm talking about a '386 Xenix Public Access Unix system with four lines,
>>talking to a '286 on a heavy loaded PC LAN of over 200 PC's, downloading
>>files at 1400cps with PEP.  The best, accurate(*), speeds we've gotten with
>>UUCP over PEP (with UUCP spoofing) is just over 1200cps.  Zmodem xfer rates
>>remain almost constant for any load, UUCP xfer rates seem to drop off
>>almost immediately.

I should correct this, the best we've gotten with PEP and UUCP is 1300cps.

							Ross Ridge

-- 
Ross Ridge - The Great HTMU					     l/	 //
								    [OO][oo]
ross@zooid.guild.org						    /()\/()/
uunet.ca!zooid!ross						     db	 //
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
From: rsalz@osf.org (Rich Salz)
Subject: Re: INN/nntplink performance (was Re: Cnews Performance)
Organization: Open Software Foundation
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1992 15:36:52 GMT

In <CKD.92Jul25165340@loiosh.eff.org> ckd@eff.org (Christopher Davis) writes:
>I was under the impression that INN also did the work of nntplink...
INN includes an nntpxmit replacement but not an nntplink replacement.
The "-i stdin" flag was added so that nntplink would work more nicely
with INN.  I know of a few efforts to write alternatives to nntplink,
including one in perl and a couple to handle multiple feeds.  They
will be released by their authors when they're ready.
	/r$
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
From: ckd@eff.org (Christopher Davis)
Subject: Re: INN/nntplink performance (was Re: Cnews Performance)
Organization: Electronic Frontier Foundation Tech Central
	<CKD.92Jul24205908@loiosh.eff.org> <14rk0aINN6um@smurf.smurf.sub.org>
Date: Sat, 25 Jul 1992 20:53:42 GMT

MU> == Matthias Urlichs <urlichs@smurf.sub.org> 

 MU> INN and nntplink work very well together. A typical disk-to-disk
 MU> transfer time of a couple of hundred milliseconds is OK I guess. ;-)

I was under the impression that INN also did the work of nntplink; then
again, I haven't really given it a hard look yet (though I plan to when
it leaves beta).  Learn something new on the net every day :-)
--
Christopher Davis * ckd@eff.org * System Administrator, EFF * +1 617 864 0665
   ``The First Amendment is often inconvenient.  But that is besides the
  point.  Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation
         to tolerate speech.'' --Justice Anthony Kennedy, in 91-155
From: urlichs@smurf.sub.org (Matthias Urlichs)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: INN/nntplink performance (was Re: Cnews Performance)
Date: 25 Jul 1992 15:12:41 +0200
Organization: University of Karlsruhe, FRG
NNTP-Posting-Host: smurf.sub.org

In news.sysadmin, article <CKD.92Jul24205908@loiosh.eff.org>,
  ckd@eff.org (Christopher Davis) writes:
< 
< (Another side note: Dave, as the nntplink ghod, why does your Message-ID
< look suspiciously like something out of INN?  Are you a closet $alzite?)

INN and nntplink work very well together. A typical disk-to-disk transfer
time of a couple of hundred milliseconds is OK I guess. ;-)

-- 
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance from Jack.
-- 
Matthias Urlichs  --  urlichs@smurf.sub.org -- urlichs@smurf.ira.uka.de   /(o\
Humboldtstrasse 7 -- 7500 Karlsruhe 1 -- Germany  --  +49-721-9612521     \o)/
From: gyro@kestrel.edu (Scott L. Burson)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Posting via mail?
Date: 28 Jul 92 00:27:38 GMT
Organization: Kestrel Institute, Palo Alto, CA


Hello,

I am in the process of setting up C news on my machine, fed via uucp
from kestrel.edu (the machine I am posting this from).  Kestrel is on
the Internet.

My question: Kestrel has the L flag in the third field of its sys file
entry for the Internet host that feeds it.  This will keep it from
forwarding messages I post on my machine.  Do I correctly gather that
removing the L flag will cause Kestrel to have to do a lot more work
deciding what messages it should send out?  If so, then this cost seems
out of proportion with the very small volume of traffic that will be
coming out of my machine.

Would it make more sense for all my posting to be done via mail?  I seem
to recall hearing of some machine that will accept mail and forward it
to the appropriate newsgroup(s).  If this is a good idea, does anyone
know offhand how to modify Pnews to accomplish it?  Would I also have to
modify GNUS for the same reason?  What machine should I send it to?  Do
I need permission to do this?

Thanks for your help
  Scott
  Gyro@Reasoning.COM
From: alden@shape.mps.ohio-state.edu (Dave Alden)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: Cnews Performance
Date: 24 Jul 1992 09:19:20 -0400
Organization: Department of Mathematics, The Ohio State University
NNTP-Posting-Host: shape.mps.ohio-state.edu

In article <CKD.92Jul21215252@loiosh.eff.org> ckd@eff.org (Christopher Davis) writes:
>(This is also why MIT has snorkelwacker to pump news, and bloom-beacon &
>bloom-picayune to support the readers... I bet there aren't too many
>users reading news off zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu, either.)

You would win that bet.  :-)  I would guess about 15-20 people are reading
news from zaphod at any one time (I use NFS within my department, and NNTP
to to the rest of my college).  But zaphod is my personal workstation, and
it is getting slower and slower and slower...:-)

...dave
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
From: ckd@eff.org (Christopher Davis)
Subject: Re: Cnews Performance
Organization: Electronic Frontier Foundation Tech Central
	<CKD.92Jul21215252@loiosh.eff.org>
	<14p00oINNqqc@shape.mps.ohio-state.edu> <Brwt88.CHL@world.std.com>
Date: Sat, 25 Jul 1992 00:59:10 GMT

Geoff> == Geoff Collyer <geoff@world.std.com> 
Dave>  == Dave Alden <alden@shape.mps.ohio-state.edu>

 Dave> But zaphod is my personal workstation, and it is getting slower
 Dave> and slower and slower...:-)

 Geoff> There's a simple fix for that, Dave: stop exchanging news with
 Geoff> every machine on the Internet that has a live NNTP port.  :-)

A blatant lie!  He's not exchanging news with us...

...yet.  (Hey, Dave, want another news neighbor? ;-)

(Another side note: Dave, as the nntplink ghod, why does your Message-ID
look suspiciously like something out of INN?  Are you a closet $alzite?)
--
Christopher Davis * ckd@eff.org * System Administrator, EFF * +1 617 864 0665
   ``The First Amendment is often inconvenient.  But that is besides the
  point.  Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation
         to tolerate speech.'' --Justice Anthony Kennedy, in 91-155
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
From: Martin.Helin@hut.fi (Martin Helin)
Subject: Re: CORE DUMP while reading news !!!
Reply-To: Martin.Helin@hut.fi
Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
	<6696@charon.cwi.nl>
Date: 20 Jul 92 09:44:15

In article <6696@charon.cwi.nl> dik@cwi.nl (Dik T. Winter) writes:

*I have had this mostly happen when, during reading of news, the spool
*directory becomes unmounted and will not be re-mounted in time.
*It can also occur if during reading news the active file (which is also
*NFS mounted) is replaced by a new one (because new newsgroups are added or
*something like that).  Under NFS the old file will actually be removed
*although the file is open.  But the file is open through an NFS mount and
*the NFS server does not know that.

In my case neither the spool directory nor the active file (nor
anything else) is mounted. So this really doesn't explain rn's
behaviour. And I'd REALLY like to get rid of this problem.

     Martin

Martin Helin	Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
Internet : Martin.Helin@hut.fi UUCP : uunet.uu.net!kaira.hut.fi!s30986u
X.400 : G=Martin S=Helin O=hut ADMD=fumail C=fi
 
--
Martin Helin	Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
Internet : Martin.Helin@hut.fi UUCP : uunet.uu.net!kaira.hut.fi!s30986u
X.400 : G=Martin S=Helin O=hut ADMD=fumail C=fi
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
From: alexis@panix.com (Alexis Rosen)
Subject: Re: Posting via mail?
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1992 10:06:31 GMT
Organization: PANIX Public Access Unix, NYC

gyro@kestrel.edu (Scott L. Burson) writes:
>I am in the process of setting up C news on my machine, fed via uucp
>from kestrel.edu (the machine I am posting this from).  Kestrel is on
>the Internet.

>My question: Kestrel has the L flag in the third field of its sys file
>entry for the Internet host that feeds it.  This will keep it from
>forwarding messages I post on my machine.  Do I correctly gather that
>removing the L flag will cause Kestrel to have to do a lot more work
>deciding what messages it should send out?  If so, then this cost seems
>out of proportion with the very small volume of traffic that will be
>coming out of my machine.

>Would it make more sense for all my posting to be done via mail?

No. If Kestrel is running Cnews, change the L flag to "L1". If kestrel isn't
running Cnews then upgrade it. :-)

--
Alexis Rosen   Owner/Sysadmin,
PANIX Public Access Unix & Internet, NYC.
alexis@panix.com
{uupsi,cmcl2}!panix!alexis
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
From: geoff@world.std.com (Geoff Collyer)
Subject: Re: C news feed restriction not working?!
Organization: Software Tool & Die Netnews Research Center
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1992 22:43:58 GMT

Scott L. Burson:
>[...] I seem to be getting everything (6Mb arrived this morning).  I
>can't afford either the phone bill or the disk space for a full feed.
>Does anyone have any guesses as to the problem?  The sys file line on
>kestrel reads:

Assuming that the sys file entry for zetasoft really is a single line (it
appeared in your message as two lines), it looks fine.  (Note that you
can continue sys file lines; see newssys(5) for details.)

However, 6MB per day is nothing like a full feed.  A full feed averages
over 35MB per day, with a peak in mid-week (if this is Wednesday, that
would be 50MB today).  Are you actually getting messages on zetasoft
containing no groups named in (or implied by) the sys entry for zetasoft,
or have you just picked some high-volume groups?
-- 
Geoff Collyer		world.std.com!geoff, uunet.uu.net!geoff
From: alden@shape.mps.ohio-state.edu (Dave Alden)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: Cnews Performance
Date: 26 Jul 1992 17:17:45 -0400
Organization: Department of Mathematics, The Ohio State University
NNTP-Posting-Host: shape.mps.ohio-state.edu

In article <CKD.92Jul24205908@loiosh.eff.org> ckd@eff.org (Christopher Davis) writes:
>(Another side note: Dave, as the nntplink ghod, why does your Message-ID
>look suspiciously like something out of INN?  Are you a closet $alzite?)

Yes - I'm a closet $alzite -- the secret is out.  :-)  Currently INN doesn't
replace nntplink - you still need some mechanism to transmit the articles to
your neighbor nntp sites.

...dave

ps  I'm finishing up version 3.1 of nntplink, hopefully it will go into beta
    late next week, and then be released in ~2 weeks (and I'm actually going
    to post this version to one of the source newsgroups.  :-)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
From: geoff@world.std.com (Geoff Collyer)
Subject: Re: C news Performance
Keywords: diskload FFS
Organization: Software Tool & Die Netnews Research Center
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1992 18:02:28 GMT

Usenet news system:
>The Berkeley FFS tries to collect files in the same directory in the same
>cyl.group. But in C-news, the file will first been written in the in.coming
>directory and then (clearly) linked to the proper spool-directory

It may be clear to you that the above is how C News operates, but it's
also utterly wrong.  Since in.coming may be in a different file system
from the article tree (due to mounts or symbolic links), and since
articles usually arrive in batches (if they don't, they should), articles
are copied out of the batches (in in.coming) into the article tree.  The
"Fast" File System should be able to cope with all of this.
-- 
Geoff Collyer		world.std.com!geoff, uunet.uu.net!geoff
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
From: geoff@world.std.com (Geoff Collyer)
Subject: Re: Cnews Performance
Organization: Software Tool & Die Netnews Research Center
Date: Fri, 24 Jul 1992 20:07:19 GMT

Dave Alden:
>But zaphod is my personal workstation, and it is getting slower and
>slower and slower...:-)

There's a simple fix for that, Dave: stop exchanging news with every
machine on the Internet that has a live NNTP port.  :-)
-- 
Geoff Collyer		world.std.com!geoff, uunet.uu.net!geoff
Xref: sparky news.sysadmin:1165 news.software.nntp:909
Organization: K.U.Leuven - Academic Computing Center
Date: Tuesday, 28 Jul 1992 11:08:01 +02
From: VAN UYTVEN HERMAN <SYSTHVU@cc1.kuleuven.ac.be>
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin,news.software.nntp
Subject: test our VM NNTP server


Hello,

We have  written a  NNTP server for  VM (in REXX,  using RXSOCKET  and a
modified version of PSUVM's netnews).

Before we make  this available to end-users at our  University, we would
like it to be tested as much as possible.

So,  this  server  is  available  for  read,  post,  xfer  and  xmit  on
134.58.20.2, standard port 119.
The  server understands  all standard  NNTP  commands +  some UNIX  NNTP
extensions like xhdr, auth and  xcmd.  The  only limitation is  that for
xfer (newnews command), we do not allow wild-cards in the newsgroup name
(this is because all requests must  be handled in a reasonable amount of
time (we  can't (yet ?) fork  a process for every  connection), and this
wouldn't be the case for commands like 'newnews comp.* 920725 082523').

We have tested the server already with :
 - reading and  posting via xrn,  nnr, nnmvs, trumpet, tin  and TheNews.
   (TheNews had some problems, but as far as we could figure out it are
   client problems, not server problems).

   I  would be  especially interested  in postings  from other  clients.
   Since posting  is not well  defined in  the RFC's, and  because every
   client seems  to use other formats,  I would like some  test postings
   (you   can   use   newsgroups  vmnntp.test   (local)   or   misc.test
   (worldwide)).

 - receiving news send by nntpxmit.  The server receives already two
   months a full feed via xmit.

 - a limited amount of xfer-ing news.
   Here I would like  a test with someone asking a lot  of news via xfer
   (but the xfer  client needs to specify  groupnames without wild-cards
   or comma's, e.g. comp.sys.*  or news.answer,news.software.nntp in the
   newnews command is not allowed).


 Although this server receives a full  feed, we do not store everything.
 The news  server behind the nntp  server keeps comp, sci,  news and bit
 for 7 days, other groups are only kept for 3 or 0 days.

 If someone who uses this server finds a problem, please mail me. During
 netnews purge (around 0 hour GMT = evening in the USA), the NNTP server
 is not available.

 The software was mostly written by a student of our University,
 Kris Van Hees (gutest6@cc1.kuleuven.ac.be).

 Thanks,

---------------------------------------------------------------------
| Herman Van Uytven              e-mail: SYSTHVU@BLEKUL11.BITNET    |
| Academic Computing Center              SYSTHVU@cc1.kuleuven.ac.be |
| K.U.Leuven                     Tel: (+32) (16) 286611 local 2225  |
| Willem De Croylaan 52-a        Fax: (+32) (16) 207168             |
| B-3001 Heverlee (Leuven)                                          |
| Belgium                        postmaster for cc1.kuleuven.ac.be  |
---------------------------------------------------------------------
From: gt5870c@prism.gatech.EDU (Noah White)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Help needed compiling C-News *please*
Date: 23 Jul 92 18:43:30 GMT
Organization: Universal Exports


  Hi, I am trying to compile c-news on a Sun 3/260 running SunOS4.1.1 and when
I run the doit.bin script I get the following error:

+ cd ../libbig 
+ make u 
cc -O -I../include -I../relay  -target sun3 -c  active.fast.c
"../include/libc.h", line 62: redeclaration of sprintf
*** Error code 1
make: Fatal error: Command failed for target `active.fast.o'
+ exit 1 

I get the same error when I try to compile both the new ALPHA release and the 
older version. Any suggestions would be most appreciated. Thanx!

---
Noah White

Newsgroups: news.sysadmin