williams@cs.umass.edu (11/10/89)
I am trying get news running at our site. The bnews 2.11 software was copied from uunet a couple of months ago. It ALMOST works. All of the underlying uucp stuff is ok as we have been getting our mail via uunet for a long time now. I am polling uunet for a newsfeed. There is a problem with running rnews, on my end it seems. Our system is a masscomp 5700 running v4 of RTU. Porting things to RTU has been nothing but trouble - it's kinda like SYSV, kinda like BSD, but has enough differences to make ports a real pain! I changed very few of the defaults for the build - things like manually and nonewgroups. I have verified that the compressed news is being received by copying the TM* file in /usr/spool/uucp/uunet to another file, stripping off the first line and then running it through zcat. Sure enough, there are the articles! But because of the rnews problems, the files transfered end up getting changed into an error message such as the one I've included below. rnews lives in /usr/bin, the default, so I don't think an L.cmds file is needed but I tried one anyway with no effect. I tried both with and without a PATH statement. First I tried the one in misc/L.cmds of the distribution and then tried editing it in various ways. I used strings to look at uuxqt and found the strings /bin and /usr/bin so that's not the problem. ls -l of rnews shows: -rwsr-sr-x 2 news news 124036 /usr/bin/rnews which is what it should be. I normally run uucico from root but I also tried running it from news and it didn't make any difference. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Copy of mail received after a recent attempt: From uucp Mon Nov 6 18:47:04 EST 1989 remote from aai remote execution [uucp job uunetdekS3 (11/6-18:47:03)] rnews execution permission denied to aai!root ------------------------------------------------------------------- Do anyone have any idea what the problem is? Someone at uunet said it looked like uuxqt can't find rnews on my system but I don't see why that would be. Let me know if you need any more info about files, protections, directories, etc for diagnostic purposes. We have the O'Reilly book, but it doesn't go into enough detail for this sort of problem. This is our first news install. Maybe we should try C news instead? RTU is a SYSV clone though. Any help GREATLY appreciated! Thanks! Leo Pinard c/o williams@cs.umass.edu
leo@aai.UUCP (Leo Pinard) (11/15/89)
In article <6501@dime.cs.umass.edu> williams@cs.umass.edu writes: >I am trying get news running at our site. The bnews 2.11 software was >copied from uunet a couple of months ago. >------------------------------------------------------------------- >Copy of mail received after a recent attempt: > >From uucp Mon Nov 6 18:47:04 EST 1989 remote from aai >remote execution [uucp job uunetdekS3 (11/6-18:47:03)] > rnews >execution permission denied to aai!root >------------------------------------------------------------------- Problem solved! It turned out that RTU uses a Permissions file like BNU. Making the appropriate entries in this file got things going. ----- Leo Pinard leo@aai.uucp
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (11/16/89)
In article <6501@dime.cs.umass.edu> williams@cs.umass.edu writes: > rnews >execution permission denied to aai!root > >Do anyone have any idea what the problem is? Someone at uunet said it >looked like uuxqt can't find rnews on my system but I don't see why >that would be... Looks to me like the problem is not rnews being unfindable, but rnews not being in the list of legal commands for execution by uuxqt. For security reasons, uuxqt will execute only certain commands. In very old uucp implementations, the list was compiled in. Nowadays it is usually specified in a control file of some kind. You need to look hard at exactly how your uucp specifies that list -- I'm not up on all the variations -- and revise the list to include rnews. >... This is our first news install. Maybe we should try C >news instead? RTU is a SYSV clone though. C News runs fine under System V, although there are occasional problems because "System V" is a family of vaguely-related systems, not a single system, and things like the output format of "df" change a lot. One thing that could be a problem with C News for you, though, is that its current documentation probably isn't sufficient for a novice administrator. -- A bit of tolerance is worth a | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology megabyte of flaming. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu