samperi@dasys1.UUCP (Dominick Samperi) (12/22/87)
I received many responses to my recent requests for information on news patching and forwarding. Thanks! I'll describe the procedures that have worked, followed by a question about posting news through a machine that is not running the news software. NEWS PATCHING. I think I used the 14 patches, exactly as they were distributed, and I found two typos. The first occured in patch #4, which contained a fix for a typo that occured in patch #3. It turns out that the fix for the typo itself contained a typo! Look for the part of patch #4 that is supposed to replace UNLINK(ACTIVE, ...) with UNLINK(...). In the version I used the word ACTIVE was missing. The second typo occured in patch #14, and it only shows up on USG systems. This typo was reported in this newsgroup recently, it involved an ifdef being used where an ifndef should be. I think the constant in question was MKDIRSYS (sorry, I don't have the source in front of me). After correcting these typos, the news source code is patched by shelling the source files in src.* into the source directory, cd-ing to this directory, and typing: patch < patch1 patch < patch2 ... patch < patch14 Here patch1, patch2, etc. are the distributed patches, with the typos in patch4 and patch14 corrected. I used patchlevel 4 of the patch program (it may not work if an earlier patchlevel is used). After applying the patches, the news software was compiled and runs without a problem on a Microport System V/AT system. It also compiled and runs fine on an SCO Xenix system. NEWS FORWARDING. My site has two machines, let's call them A and B, and we'll call our news feed F. The machine F sends compressed/batched news to A, but A has limited disk space, so it immediately forwards everything to machine B. This is done by making 'rnews' on machine A the following shell script: 'uux - B!rnews'. (Machine A is not even running the news software.) The sys file on machine B has an entry for the feed F, but none for machine A, so machine A is invisible. This all works fine, and my question will be why the following tricks do not seem to enable users on machine B to post news. The last field of the sys file entry for machine F (on B) contains the command 'uux - A!postnews', and 'postnews' on machine A is actually the following shell script: 'sed -e "1s/B!/A!B!/" | uux - F!rnews'. With this configuration news articles that are posted on machine B do seem to be sent to the feed, F, but apparently, no further. Any comments, etc. would be greatly appreciated. -- Dominick Samperi, Manhattan College, New York, NY ...!ihnp4!cmcl2!manhat!samperi ...!ihnp4!cmcl2!phri!dasys1!samperi