[news.sysadmin] Problems with inews.....

mikej@lilink.UUCP (Michael R. Johnston) (10/10/88)

I have just finished going through the ordeal of getting news running on
an ancient Lee Data Xenix box. Everything seems to be running pretty good
.....so far....     The only problem that has cropped up has to do with
inews and the creation of new newsgroups/ changing of newsgroups from moderated
and back etc.

When I execute inews like this:

/usr/lib/news/inews -C to.lilink


I get:

Please type in a paragraph describing the new newsgroup.
End with control D as usual.
/usr/lib/news/inews -n test.ctl -c newgroup test  -d local -a "root@lilink.UUCP"

The blasted thing just brings me back to the shell prompt and doesn't create
ANYTHING. The same happens when I try to run checkgroups also. I get nothing
done from inews.

Now  the interesting part starts. I got wise and used the command line it
displayed when I did "/usr/lib/news/inews -C test". The darn thing works
just like expected. I enter the newsgroup description and press control-d
and voila! I have a new group named test. 

I have tried this as root and as the news user and get the same results
every time. The nearest I can tell is that when inews sees the "-C" argument
it fudges a command line and re-executes itself with a system() call.

Can anyone help? Please reply via a bang path since I dont thing my system
has made it to the maps yet. 

Mike Johnston

cmcl2!philabs!mergvax!lilink!mikej

Thanks.