borman (08/28/82)
Good day, and have I got some wierdness for you. I was posting an article to net.unix-wizards, when I got a message from inews: Cannot install article as /usr/spool/news/net.unix-wizards/881 Upon further investigation, I saw that the last 15-20 articles that had come in had been thrown away for the same reason. The .net.unix-wizards file had 880 x's in it, and article 881 existed, so I looked at it. Guess what it was? It was a C.whatever file! (you know, the kind uucp creates to keep track of file transfers) So I went over to the spool/uucp directory, and looked to see if any of the dependency files existed. Of course they didn't. I've never seen anything like this before. UUCP should know nothing about the NEWS directories, so I would have to assume that the file was created by inews (rnews). But NEWS doesn't know about the UUCP spool directory, so it would have to have been passed the file from UUCP. But why didn't news update the .net.unix-wizards file? And now for some more wierdness, the file 881 was owned by UUCP and group NEWS, and chmoded 666, where as all the other articles are owned by and group NEWS, and chmoded 644. Outgoing C.xxxxxxx files of news all are owned by UUCP and group NEWS, chmoded 666, so from this angle it looks like UUCP created it. (There's about a 80-90% chance that the C.xxxxx file was intended for a news article transfer) Has anyone got any ideas how these two programs got together and created this file (.../net.unix-wizards/881) ? Has anyone else seen this sort of wierdness? Can anyone point me in the direction of where the possible culprit is (besides "Somewhere in uucico or inews". I'm looking for sub- routine names, that sort of thing) ? Thanks much. (By the way, I almost forgot. We are running version 2.9 of BNEWS, and our UUCP came with the V7 distro several years ago.) -Dave Borman St. Olaf College ihnss!ihps3!stolaf!borman harpo!stolaf!borman