robert@woodt.uucp (Robert Sexton) (04/06/90)
The anne.jones file completely mystifies me. I know it is the netnews censor, but How do I use it? I wish to specify which users are allowed ot post outside the machine, but I havent the foggiest how to do it. Whoever put together the cnews scripts is a twisted, brilliant person. They are the most complicated things i have seen yet. What is the role of the sys file? I know it determines outgoing feeds, but it seems to have some control over incoming files, also. is there much use for the f flag in a sys entry? I run a small site attached to a backbone, so I simple want to ship out locally generated articles. It would seem that inews looks in the sys file to see who gets the article, but then what? Does it write it's id in the togo file? At what point does the batcher get involved? I realize it needs to be run by cron. I am very pleased with cnews. It came up and ran with little or no help from me. This is my first news admin, and things are going very well so far. ( I am scrambling up the learning curve as best i can :-) -- Robert Sexton, Woodtechnique Inc. robert@woodt.UUCP ukma!woodt!robert
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (04/07/90)
In article <1990Apr6.051900.8956@woodt.uucp> robert@woodt.uucp (Robert Sexton) writes: >... Whoever >put together the cnews scripts is a twisted, brilliant person... Yeah, that's a fair description of Geoff. :-) Inews and its auxiliaries are his work, so I'll let him respond to the anne.jones question. The inews stuff is very flexible but is admittedly a bit hard to figure out. >What is the role of the sys file? I know it determines outgoing feeds, >but it seems to have some control over incoming files, also. The ME line in the sys file (or alternatively the line with a system name identical to that of the system news is running on) determines which groups your site subscribes to. This is documented (!) (:-)) in the news.5 manpage. >is there much use for the f flag in a sys entry? I run a small site >attached to a backbone, so I simple want to ship out locally generated >articles... The f flag is mostly useful for bulk feeds. It's not going to make a big difference to you if your site is mostly receive-only with little outgoing traffic. >It would seem that inews looks in the sys file to see who gets >the article, but then what? Does it write it's id in the togo file? Well, more properly it's relaynews (called by inews and by newsrun) that does all this. Relaynews uses the sys file to decide who gets articles, and then (in the presence of the f flag) writes the pathname of the article and its length to the togo file for the batcher. When the batcher gets run, usually by cron, it consults the togo file and uses it to prepare outgoing batches, picking up the actual articles and bundling them up for transmission. >I am very pleased with cnews. It came up and ran with little or no help >from me. This is my first news admin, and things are going very well >so far. ( I am scrambling up the learning curve as best i can :-) That's good to hear. Our documentation definitely isn't set up well for beginners; I'm glad that at least some are managing well even so. -- Apollo @ 8yrs: one small step.| Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology Space station @ 8yrs: .| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
geoff@utstat.uucp (Geoff Collyer) (04/09/90)
Robert Sexton: > The anne.jones file completely mystifies me. I know it is the netnews censor, More accurately, anne.jones is the header censor for locally-posted articles; inews does some censoring of the message body (mostly invisible characters) itself. > but How do I use it? I wish to specify which users are allowed ot post > outside the machine, but I havent the foggiest how to do it. You could try inserting some test in the middle of anne.jones which would cause it to exit prematurely for some users, thus generating headerless articles, which will be rejected by inews. A cleaner solution would be to put the test in inews, possibly after invoking anne.jones, so that inews can produce a meaningful error report. However, beware that users who are determined to post can bypass inews by adding the necessary headers by hand (which isn't all that hard, especially if you read RFC 1036 first) and invoking inews -p, rnews, relaynews, 'uux - machine!rnews', 'mail ucbvax!rnews', etc. directly. I doubt that rejecting postings will work for any but the most technically naive users. > Whoever put together the cnews scripts is a twisted, brilliant person. I suppose this is a backhanded compliment of sorts. Um, thanks. :-) > They are the most complicated things i have seen yet. Hmmm, perhaps you haven't seen much software yet? :-) inews and related scripts are gradually being overhauled and the more twisted, brilliant bits are being replaced by mundane, obvious C code (e.g. the incredible tangle in anne.jones to pick up the poster's login name, which currently weighs in at 24 lines of shell script, including a 6-line comment to explain what's going on, is turning into the obvious 3 lines of C). Where possible, policy will not be cast in C. The complexity is, I think, the product of attempting to write inews without writing new C code. Conceptually, inews is just a simple front-end filter for relaynews, but in practice some of the error recovery, header molesting, and routing decisions may just be too complex to reliably write in the shell or old awk (without giving up yet more speed, anyway). (On the other hand, the shell does some parts of the job quite well; for example, turning options into headers.) -- Geoff Collyer utzoo!utstat!geoff, geoff@utstat.toronto.edu