maine@elxsi.dfrf.nasa.gov (Richard Maine) (07/29/89)
I have been installing C news on one of our systems here and thought I'd share some of my experiences. This is a first-time news installation, both for the system and for me. We have a B news (not installed by me) on one of our Suns, but wanted to move it off of there onto our Elxsi. It took me a substantial amount of time to get oriented about what was going on at all. Most of the documentation tends to assume that you are already both a unix and netNews guru familliar with the inards of both. Please take this as a comment, not a flame; I'm very familliar with the dificulties of writing documentation for novices (even when the novices are as quick on the uptake as I am :->). Eventually, I did manage to get most of it straightened out, but I don't want to admit how much time that took. (Slightly less time than it took to do Zork 1, but the puzzles in Zork were more fun, and more obvious.) The system I'm working on is an Elxsi running a system V.3 unix. Actually, we simultaneously run the proprietary Embos operating system, but I only tried to put the netNews stuff on the Unix "side" because its too much pain to port all the Unixisms to Embos. We have not bothered to bring up uucp, and I'm not sure if we ever will. We are on the internet and are using solely nntp for news. This was one of the more confusing aspects of the documentation - figuring out what parts of the C news system applied to us at all. We have made a /loc file system for local software and I decided to install C news in /loc/lib/news, /loc/spool/news and /loc/src/news, rather than in the "standard" places in /usr. One of the many things about Unix that I find annoying (gasp! Oops, wrong audience) is the way that system stuff, local stuff, and user stuff tends to be mixed together in an inextricable web. Mostly this seems to arise from convention rather than any inherent limitations. (End of irrelevant, snide remarks; you Unixers can uncover your eyes now). The unshar of the first part failed because there was no doc subdirectory. Presumably a "mkdir doc" was accidentally omitted. This was trivial to fix, of course. I did need the 7Jul89 patch to make the "test" stuff in the makeFiles work. (Which meant I first had to get the patch program - one of the several pieces of trivia that I'm sure "everybody knows" but took me a while to find). I had to patch the sysV spacefor to change the nr=2 in the awk input to nr=1. (Which meant I first had to figure out what in the heck awk does. I'd previously been successful in completely ingoring awk. Sigh.) I also found it a good idea to make a backup copy of spacefor; otherwise, every time I retried the installation procedure (some of us dummies need more than 1 try - in fact some of us run out of fingers to count the tries on), it wiped out my patch. It was not clear from the documentation that I needed to make a subdirectory of /loc/spool/news/out.going for each system in my sys file. I didn't figure this out till after I studied the error messages in one of the log files. Anne.jones seems to have a few problems (in addition to her obvious psychiatric problems :-)). These may relate to running nntp. She is causing "who" to bitch about the "am I" option being invalid if stdin is not a terminal, and I also get a bitch about not finding a ypmatch command. I have not yet gotten serious about tracking down these problems. They don't seem to actually prevent posting from working, but its one of the things I want to clean up before letting users (ab)use this installation. The batch.c file in the nntpdiffs had hard-wired path names in artfile() and binfile() that needed changing. Also in batch.c, enqueue() does an execl() of newsrun. Our system doesn't like this at all, presumably because newsrun is a shell script instead of an executable program. I have no idea whether this is "supposed" to work, but it didn't on our system. I hacked around this by praying devoutly while changing the execl() call to execute /bin/sh with newsrun as an argument. Either the prayer or the change seemed to work - I felt a little more confident that I knew what I was doing with the prayer (to the Gods of Unix, of course). A similar problem with execl() of shell scripts occurred in spawn.c in the nntp 1.5 distribution itself. After I grokked (or was that grepped? :-)) the code enough to deduce that spawn() was called only for inews and rnews, both of which are shell scripts, I also changed this call to execl() /bin/sh with an appropriate argument. That summarizes the things I did that seem worth passing along. The rest of it mostly involved either local issues or the long and continuing saga of my education. The system is (more or less) running, though I'm still testing and tweaking. It transfers the news and I can read it with gnus under gnu emacs. I am getting regular "bad" input batches that "fail" with error 16, as I have seen discussed in other messages in this group. Will try the fix of adding a junk group to my sys file. I'm also getting some mysterious memory fault messages mailed to me from the cron jobs. Thought I'd tested them out, at least when run directly instead of through cron. I haven't yet thoroughly investigated what is happening there. -- Richard Maine maine@elxsi.dfrf.nasa.gov [130.134.1.1]