grr@cbm.UUCP (George Robbins) (01/18/86)
Having just set up news 2.10.3 with batched feeds and downstream sites, I would
like to make the following corrections/comments about Bob Designer's notes:
Bob recommends using 'uux...frobozz!cunbatch' to send the batched files, then
gives some tortured explanation of how to make this work. If you simply use
the default 'uux...frobozz!rnews', rnews(inews) on the receiving end sniffs at
the file, sees that it has to run cunbatch, which tries to run out of LIBDIR.
There are also some concerns about compress 3.0 applicable to smaller system.
As compiled by news, it assumes that you have a lot of memory available. On
a 68000 system, I did a 'size compress' and got about 700K. If you don't have
this kind of memory, or trying to use that much puts your system out to lunch,
you should recompile compress. Defining the symbol 'pdp11' creates a much
smaller program at the cost of some compression efficiency.
If you do this, sites that send you batched news must specify the -b 12 switch
to csendbatch or you will not be able to decode their news. Also, if you are
sending news to a 2.10.2 site that has not since installed compress 3.0 or 4.0,
you must use the -C option to generate batches that they can process.
When trying to set up expire, it's a good idea to do a (tar/dump/cpio) dump of
your LIBDIR and SPOOLDIR directories, since there's a good chance expire will
start blowing away articles you wanted to keep. In addition to the features
that Bob mentions, expire likes to delete cross-posted articles from all the
newsgroups they are posted to, even though you wished to preserve a particular
group.
Note that when trying to install news, you should try to work with someone
that has already installed 2.10.3. The installation instructions leave you
hanging about 2/3's of the way through the process, apparently since the
document wasn't completely updated when most of the 2.10.2 auto-installation
stuff was chopped out.
--
George Robbins - now working with, uucp: {ihnp4|seismo|caip}!cbm!grr
but no way officially representing arpa: cbm!grr@seismo.css.GOV
Commodore, Engineering Department fone: 215-431-9255 (only by moonlite)