tale@pawl.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) (07/18/89)
Sigh. This is getting exasperating. Today I finally made the big
kill -HUP of inetd to jump into C News and it was seriously broken.
This whole thing is rather frustrating. Here is just a small summary
of the problems I have encountered on rpi.edu, a Sun 3 running SunOS 4.
o doexpire is a real pain. It bombed out in cron when it kept trying
to rsh to somewhere. Why the heck it was rshing anywhere is not
currently something I understand.
o I moved nntp_support stuff from contrib into $NEWSBIN/nntp where it
could be found. I had to take care of stuff like complaints from
server_inews not being able to find server.censor, server_censor not
using the GMT date format which we prefer, message-ids not being
generated the way we want them for default ids and Lines: not being
added. As of when I switched back to B News I still hadn't conquered
the lines problem.
o While I switched over to my C News nntpd I didn't get any articles
from other sites. I could, however, post a couple of test messages to
rpi.test with GNUS.
All in all this whole installation has been quite disappointing. I
was hoping to have it all running nice and smoothly. Instead I find
the documentation spread out and sometimes very sketchy, very few
clear examples about how certain things should be set up and lots of
things that I don't appear to need at all.
Examples:
o We don't do _any_ UUCP. I'd much rather just blast all of the
files related to only UUCP off my disks so I have less clutter and
a more easily understood set of files.
o DBZ is there and seems like a performance win. Documentation on
how I should compile with it, however, is hard to come by in the
distribution if it is indeed there at all.
o The documentation says that I should be able to run B News and C
News concurrently until I am sure that C News is working. This is
indeed what I would have done but I couldn't find anything to tell me
how to actually go about doing it.
I know this sounds like a major gripe. I'm sorry. I'm sure that
Geoff and Henry did a fine job in the programming of C News. I am
just having a really hard time getting it all to work and it has me
very frustrated. Any help would be appreciated.
Dave
--
(setq mail '("tale@pawl.rpi.edu" "tale@itsgw.rpi.edu" "tale@rpitsmts.bitnet"))lamy@ai.utoronto.ca (Jean-Francois Lamy) (07/18/89)
tale@pawl.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) writes: > o I moved nntp_support stuff from contrib into $NEWSBIN/nntp where it >could be found. I had to take care of stuff like complaints from >server_inews not being able to find server.censor, server_censor not >using the GMT date format which we prefer, message-ids not being >generated the way we want them for default ids and Lines: not being Apart from the GMT stuff, for which I will send out a fix, what you describe are local policy decisions. Nothing in contrib is advertized as being part of C news. You don't even need anything in nntp_support to use NNTP with C news. The standard inews does work, and it is only invoked for the POST command. (actually not quite, inews will include a path that points to the $USER value of whoever started nntpd, which is wrong. You can simply nuke the line in defhdrs.awk that overrides Path:, since your client nntp inews will have put one there that you should trust). > o While I switched over to my C News nntpd I didn't get any articles >from other sites. I could, however, post a couple of test messages to >rpi.test with GNUS. nntpd does not use inews when getting articles from the outside world. It creates batches in in.coming and runs them through by calling newsrun. Do batches appear in in.coming? If not, are you running NNTP1.5.5 with the C news patches applied? -- the source files included in the distribution are 1.5 and don't work with 1.5.5. If you create a fake batch by hand and put it in in.coming, do they go through if you invoke newsrun like nntpd/server/batch.c does? I will post a follow-up article with details on the minimal things one needs to do to get NNTP and C news living together. Jean-Francois Lamy lamy@ai.utoronto.ca, uunet!ai.utoronto.ca!lamy AI Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4 p.s. What what is in contrib/nntp_support is a (now outdated) snapshot of what was running on neat.ai.toronto.edu and jarvis.csri.toronto.edu at the time C news was released, nothing more. server.inews was born because we wanted to be able to mail articles to a remote news serv while trusting the headers generated by a mailer; when we installed NNTP we kept using the same script since it avoided a fair amount of work on our beaten-up news server. We used to call inews on the articles of the 300 mailing lists we feed into newsgroups; we now call relaynews direct after minimal munging, but at the time the difference was significant.
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (07/19/89)
In article <TALE.89Jul17180751@imagine.pawl.rpi.edu> tale@pawl.rpi.edu writes: > o doexpire is a real pain. It bombed out in cron when it kept trying >to rsh to somewhere. Why the heck it was rshing anywhere is not >currently something I understand. Spacefor, which doexpire invokes, thinks you are not running on the machine which is your server (i.e. where your news database resides) and is trying to rsh over there so it can get a dependable answer on how much disk space you have. We strongly recommend that the cron stuff should be run on the server; NFS breaks Unix filesystem semantics so badly in places that in our opinion it is a mistake to try to pretend that you have shared filesystems. NFS should be viewed as a superior replacement for FTP, not as a real network-wide Unix filesystem. If you *are* running on the server, something is wrong with either your hostname command or the contents of /usr/lib/news/server, I'd say. > o DBZ is there and seems like a performance win. Documentation on >how I should compile with it, however, is hard to come by in the >distribution if it is indeed there at all. DBZ, like the other stuff in the contrib directory, was included on an as-is basis and we decline to accept any responsibility for it giving trouble. DBZ will probably move to a better part of town :-) sometime soon, but that has not actually happened yet. > o The documentation says that I should be able to run B News and C >News concurrently until I am sure that C News is working. This is >indeed what I would have done but I couldn't find anything to tell me >how to actually go about doing it. It isn't especially difficult: just have rnews/cunbatch feed the incoming stuff to both news systems, and configure C News so it puts its directories somewhere other than the places B News uses. Oh yes, and you'd best make sure that only one of the two is feeding your neighbors! -- $10 million equals 18 PM | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology (Pentagon-Minutes). -Tom Neff | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
tale@pawl.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) (07/19/89)
In <1989Jul18.170541.18524@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
HS> If you *are* running on the server, something is wrong with either your
HS> hostname command or the contents of /usr/lib/news/server, I'd say.
That was it. hostname on rpi.edu is returning just rpi, which is
broken AFAIC.
In <TALE.89Jul17180751@imagine.pawl.rpi.edu> I whined:
Me> o The documentation says that I should be able to run B News and C
Me>News concurrently until I am sure that C News is working. This is
Me>indeed what I would have done but I couldn't find anything to tell me
Me>how to actually go about doing it.
HS> It isn't especially difficult: just have rnews/cunbatch feed the incoming
HS> stuff to both news systems, and configure C News so it puts its directories
HS> somewhere other than the places B News uses. Oh yes, and you'd best make
HS> sure that only one of the two is feeding your neighbors!
Okay, in Jean-Francois' correspondence with me he summarized how NNTP
interacted with the news system: (yes, private correspondence; seems
quite harmless in this case)
JF> For NNTP, nntpd creates the batches in in.coming and calls newsrun
JF> immediately, bypassing newsspool.
All the binaries are being kept separate. The libcnews directory is
separate. The spool directory would hopefully be shared. What JF
says though doesn't even indicate to me that rnews/cunbatch is used in
my environment. And inetd.conf can really only point to one nntpd, so
which would it point to? The one that is supposed to work for B News
or the one which should work for C News?
One other thing: just before I HUP inetd I've been rebuilding the
history file and awking the B News active file so everything will
start up right. I've been trying to provide an unnoticeable
transition to C News for our users and it seems that the way this
should happen is to have the B News active file and the new history
file current when the C News nntpd kicks in. Is this all correct?
Thanks for all of your help.
Dave
--
(setq mail '("tale@pawl.rpi.edu" "tale@itsgw.rpi.edu" "tale@rpitsmts.bitnet"))neitzel (Martin Neitzel) (07/20/89)
tale@pawl.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) writes:
DCL>
DCL> [...] Why the heck it was rshing anywhere is not currently
DCL> something I understand.
Sounds familiar to me. After we had failed at our first built
(NFS-version) we tried a second attempt "from scratch" with the
config script for the simplest thing we could imagine: a standalone
configuration.
However, this won't remove a number of files in the NEWSLIB directory.
Particularly, the presence of the file "server" indicated still an NFS
configuration to cnews. Just remove it.
DCL> All in all this whole installation has been quite
DCL> disappointing. I was hoping to have it all running nice and
DCL> smoothly. Instead I find the documentation spread out and
DCL> sometimes very sketchy, very few clear examples about how
DCL> certain things should be set up and lots of things that I
DCL> don't appear to need at all.
I second this motion. Installing B News the first time required you
to read the looong installation guide again and again and you had to
to tweak an option here and there several times. But all in all, I
felt it to be more transparent (and quicker) than a C news
installation is now.
I am not at all comfortable with the mystery magic that the C News
installation does. While the ReadMe suggested an easy trip with the
help of a smart shell script, I ended up rather confused. Especially
the nfs setup with its symbolic links and ignorance of suggested
directory names.
Just my irrelevant feeling about it, of course Henry and Geoff are
entitled to do their way...
DCL> o The documentation says that I should be able to run B News
DCL> and C News concurrently until I am sure that C News is
DCL> working. This is indeed what I would have done but I couldn't
DCL> find anything to tell me how to actually go about doing it.
The C news installation clobbered the B news "rnews" binary with its
own script here. Make a backup copy if it's not late.
Martin