[news.admin] Need HELP!!! with inews/postnews... news dirs.

greyham@hades.OZ (Greyham Stoney) (10/04/89)

I've recently landed the job of news administrator at our site, and NEED
HELP with inews's weirdness!. For some reason, newsgroup directories are NOT
being created when articles for new newsgroups arrive, or are posted from our
site. I can't see any way to check what inews is doing when articles for
a new newsgroup (ie: created by someone at another site) arrive - but they
ALWAYS land in junk. Once I manually create the directory, the next batch of
news to arrive goes there; but why do I have to create it?????.

Posting from our site (ie: with postnews) fails, and the article lands in
junk.... I tried posting a test message to comp.sw.components; which has only
just been created here.... Postnews says:

Posting article...
mkdir: "/usr/spool/news/comp/sw": Permission denied
mkdir: "/usr/spool/news/comp/sw/components": No such file or directory
inews: Link into /usr/spool/news/comp/sw/components/1 failed (No such file or directory); check dir permissions.
inews: Newsgroups in active, but not sys
Article posted successfully.

And whattayaknow; the article ends up in junk. As far as I can tell, I'm
using B news (I dunno.... the system was made before I even worked here!);

various files & permissions look like:
-rwsr-sr-x 2 news news 114616 Mar 31 1989 /usr/local/lib/news/inews
-rwxr-xr-x 1 news news 55168 Mar 31 1989 /usr/local/bin/postnews
drwxrwxr-x 35 news news 560 Sep 25 16:46 /usr/spool/news/comp

Can anyone tell me what's going on???.

thanks,
Greyham.

--
/* Greyham Stoney: Australia: (02) 428 6476 *
* greyham@hades.oz - Ausonics Pty Ltd, Lane Cove, Sydney, Oz. *
* TDMP/IP: Telepathic Direct Marketing Personel Interface Protocol */

greyham@hades.OZ (Greyham Stoney) (10/07/89)

Posting from our site (ie: with postnews) fails, and the article lands in
junk.... I tried posting a test message to comp.sw.components; which has only
just been created here.... Postnews says:

And whattayaknow; the article ends up in junk. As far as I can tell, I'm
using B news (I dunno.... the system was made before I even worked here!);

Can anyone tell me what's going on???.

thanks,
Greyham.
--
/* Greyham Stoney: Australia: (02) 428 6476 *
* greyham@hades.oz - Ausonics Pty Ltd, Lane Cove, Sydney, Oz. *
* TDMP/IP: Telepathic Direct Marketing Personel Interface Protocol */

Mark@Taliesin.UUCP (Mark Wickersham) (10/12/89)

In article <454@hades.OZ>, greyham@hades.OZ (Greyham Stoney) writes:
> I've recently landed the job of news administrator at our site, and NEED
> HELP with inews's weirdness!. For some reason, newsgroup directories are NOT
> being created when articles for new newsgroups arrive, or are posted from our
> site. 

  Welcome to the net.  Repeat after me.. C is portable C is portable (oh! $%#$
  my grandma's BASIC is more portable...)

> inews: Link into /usr/spool/news/comp/sw/components/1 failed (No such file or directory); check dir permissions.

  You should listen to your inews.. It's talking to you..  

Your file creation mask was probably set up so that when your system was made
you don't have rw all permission on /usr/spool/news.. and when you create
the directory (for example) /usr/spool/news/comp/sw/components by hand, 
you continue to perpetuate the wrong permissions.  You can kludge around this
if security isn't a problem by marking all news directories as rw, but
that isn't ideal (or even very workable).  Ideally, when your news was set
up, user and group id's were established for administration of news.  On
my system, the user and group are known (imaginatively enough) as news news.
All news spool and article directorys, as well as all history files should
have these as owner and group.  That way, it all works..  

I would strongly consider going through your bnews kit and setting up your
localize script, defs.h file, and any horrible nasty patches to you Makefile
that localize should've got but didn't.. (C is portable C is portable OOMMMM!)
and try remaking your system.

PS.. back the old stuff up unless you can live with down time.

PPS.. don't forget that if you change stuff in bnews, your rn etc. may need
attention.

Mark Wickersham 
Sorry about posting this, but I doubt my email stood a prayer..

kschmidt@celina.Wright.EDU (Kriss Allan Schmidt, Unix System Administrator) (10/16/89)

In article <454@hades.OZ>, greyham@hades.OZ (Greyham Stoney) writes:

   [-Much of article deleted-]

> inews: Link into /usr/spool/news/comp/sw/components/1 failed (No such file or directory); check dir permissions.
> inews: Newsgroups in active, but not sys

  These two lines are both telling you something.  The first line was 
addressed,  the second tells you which files in your ../news directory
are having conflicts.  Check to see that the articles you are being sent
(from your news feed) match what you define in your ../news/sys file.
What your feed system's sys file says should be similar to what yours
says.  (May the wizards correct me if I err! :-)  In other words, if
your feed's sys file says to send you comp and your system doesn't
list comp in the sys file,  even if it is in the active file, it will
be junk-ed.  The same thing happens if you state !comp.sw.components in
your sys file.

Good luck!!

Kriss Allan Schmidt  ph#419/586-2365 x235     *     /|           ___@___      
Wright State University, Lake Campus              /  |     ^     |     |___   
7600 St Rt 703E  Celina, Ohio  45822            /____|   ^       |WSU-Lake|   
UUCP: ...!osu-cis!wright!celina!kschmidt        _____|____   .___| Campus |___
      ...!uunet!ncrlnk!wright!celina!kschmidt   \        /   |===|  [][]  |][|
CSNET: kschmidt%celina!wright.edu@relay.cs.net~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~/``\\\\\\\\\\``
BITNET: kschmidt@CELINA.WRIGHT.EDU (maybe?)  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~/      \\\\\\\

greyham@hades.OZ (Greyham Stoney) (10/17/89)

in article <271@Taliesin.UUCP>, Mark@Taliesin.UUCP (Mark Wickersham) says:
: 
: In article <454@hades.OZ>, greyham@hades.OZ (Greyham Stoney) writes:
:> I've recently landed the job of news administrator at our site, and NEED
:> HELP with inews's weirdness!. For some reason, newsgroup directories are NOT
:> being created when articles for new newsgroups arrive, or are posted from our
:> site. 
: 
:> inews: Link into /usr/spool/news/comp/sw/components/1 failed (No such file or directory); check dir permissions.
: 
:   You should listen to your inews.. It's talking to you..  
But it DOES have permissions to create the thing!.

: Your file creation mask was probably set up so that when your system was made
: you don't have rw all permission on /usr/spool/news.. and when you create
: the directory (for example) /usr/spool/news/comp/sw/components by hand, 
: you continue to perpetuate the wrong permissions.  You can kludge around this
: if security isn't a problem by marking all news directories as rw, but
: that isn't ideal (or even very workable).  Ideally, when your news was set
: up, user and group id's were established for administration of news.  On
: my system, the user and group are known (imaginatively enough) as news news.
: All news spool and article directorys, as well as all history files should
: have these as owner and group.  That way, it all works..  

inews is setuid, setgid to news news, as you suggest. /usr/spool/news/....
directories were rwxrwxr-x  Therefore, inews DID have permission to create
subdirectories there. I could su to news and create them.... but inews just
refused to. This I can't understand. I've changed them all to rwxrwxrwx now;
I didn't want to, and I want to change them back as soon as I can find out
what is going wrong.

-- 
/*  Greyham Stoney:                            Australia: (02) 428 6476  *
 *     greyham@hades.oz  - Ausonics Pty Ltd, Lane Cove, Sydney, Oz.      *
 *    TDMP/IP: Telepathic Direct Marketing Personel Interface Protocol   */

clewis@eci386.uucp (Chris Lewis) (10/19/89)

In article <461@hades.OZ> greyham@hades.OZ (Greyham Stoney) writes:
>in article <271@Taliesin.UUCP>, Mark@Taliesin.UUCP (Mark Wickersham) says:
>: 
>: In article <454@hades.OZ>, greyham@hades.OZ (Greyham Stoney) writes:
>:> I've recently landed the job of news administrator at our site, and NEED
>:> HELP with inews's weirdness!. For some reason, newsgroup directories are NOT
>:> being created when articles for new newsgroups arrive, or are posted from our
>:   You should listen to your inews.. It's talking to you..  

And he was listening.  Talk about a useless posting.

>But it DOES have permissions to create the thing!.

Actually no, it doesn't.  In System V's which don't have the "mkdir" system
call (or setruid etc.) routine, inews has to invoke the *command* "mkdir".  
Mkdir is setuid root.  Thus, when mkdir runs, it's running effective 
userid == root, and real id == the person that invoked inews (eg: uucp or a 
normal user), *not* realid == news.

But, it discovers that the real userid does not have permission to 
create a directory there (because the parent directory is mode 7<don't care>5
owned by news, and refuses to make it.  Thus the mkdir fails.  Unless you 
have a mkdir() system call, if you're on System V you *must* make the 
directory modes 777 (edit your localize.sh).  

C-news has some *real* wierd stuff in it to get around this.

I think some of the more recent patches to B-news may get around this too.

I've had to get around this on System V for other code.  Yuck!
-- 
He's a consultant:             | Chris Lewis, Elegant Communications Inc.
Lend him your watch            | UUCP {uunet!attcan,utzoo}!lsuc!eci386!clewis
and he'll tell you the time.   | Moderator of the Ferret mailing list.
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