[news.admin] News forwarding and patching

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