[news.software.b] Problems setting up CNews.

arneny@nic.uit.no (Arne Nylund) (08/01/90)

I'm trying to install CNews on two 386-machines which both run Interactive
Unix (386/ix). My plan is both to use CNews as a conference system locally on
each machine, and to have some common conferences between the two machines. 
In the latter case, articles are transfered by UUCP.

Locally it seems that CNews is working OK, except two things:

1) the .signature file is always taken from / (root), and not from the 
users home directory.
2) dead.article is always written to /, and never to the users home 
directory.

Does anybody know what may be wrong???

In addition, I'm not able to setup CNews to exchange articles between the two 
machines. I have created a conference named "test" on machine A. All articles
in this conference should be sent to machine B. The sys-file has the following
lines

ME:test::
machineB:test:f:

which, to my knowledge, should indicate that all articles in "test" should be
queued up for transmission to machine B by appending article names and sizes
under NEWSARTS/out.going/machineB. When I submit an article, it is feed to 
inews which in turn feeds it to relaynews. Locally the article ends up 
under NEWSARTS/test, but nothing is  written to the other directory. 
Therefore, there is nothing to process for sendbatches.

What am I doing wrong? I don't know the exact function of the main CNews
components, so any hints in this direction or refrences to appropriate
literature will be helpful.

Arne

merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal Schwartz) (08/01/90)

In article <1990Jul31.183057.21455@hod.uit.no>, arneny@nic (Arne Nylund) writes:
| ME:test::
| machineB:test:f:
| 
| which, to my knowledge, should indicate that all articles in "test" should be
| queued up for transmission to machine B by appending article names and sizes
| under NEWSARTS/out.going/machineB. When I submit an article, it is feed to 
| inews which in turn feeds it to relaynews. Locally the article ends up 
| under NEWSARTS/test, but nothing is  written to the other directory. 
| Therefore, there is nothing to process for sendbatches.

Cnews is picky about distributions (sez someone who found out the hard
way).  An article without a distribution has a distribution of
"world".  Since "world" is not mentioned in your list above for
machineB, the article got deposited in just the local spool with no
relay happening.

Either: (a) add "Distribution: test" to your article, or (b) ",world"
to your machineB description.

Just another Cnews admin,
-- 
/=Randal L. Schwartz, Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095 ==========\
| on contract to Intel's iWarp project, Beaverton, Oregon, USA, Sol III      |
| merlyn@iwarp.intel.com ...!any-MX-mailer-like-uunet!iwarp.intel.com!merlyn |
\=Cute Quote: "Welcome to Portland, Oregon, home of the California Raisins!"=/

henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (08/02/90)

In article <1990Jul31.183057.21455@hod.uit.no> arneny@nic.uit.no writes:
>1) the .signature file is always taken from / (root), and not from the 
>users home directory.
>2) dead.article is always written to /, and never to the users home 
>directory.

Looks like, somehow, either your system does not set the HOME environment
variable or it is not getting to inews.  (Could it be, perhaps, that your
system is changing HOME for the login shell but is not using `export' to
pass those changes along to things invoked by the login shell?)

Try the following:

	echo 'echo $HOME' >foo
	chmod +x foo
	foo
	export HOME
	foo

If the first invocation of "foo" doesn't print the proper home directory,
your system isn't setting HOME.  If the first and second differ, your
system isn't exporting the setting.

>ME:test::
>machineB:test:f:

Try changing that second `test' to `test/all'.  *Both* newsgroup *and*
distribution must match for an article to be transmitted, and the default
distribution is `world'.
-- 
The 486 is to a modern CPU as a Jules  | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
Verne reprint is to a modern SF novel. |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry