jerry@oliveb.UUCP (Jerry F Aguirre) (12/05/86)
Version 2.11 of the news software has the ability for rnews to recognize
several forms of batching and implement the necessary unpacking.
I have seen a lot of mail traffic lately under the general heading of
"I have 2.11 installed so I can switch to rnews instead of cunbatch"
or
"Do you have 2.11 installed and can I switch to rnews instead of
cunbatch"
I leave it to the news gurus to correct me if I am wrong but there is no
advantage to sending compressed batches to remote!rnews instead of
remote!cunbatch.
The only advantage to receiving rnews instead of cunbatch is that you
don't have to add cunbatch to the list of allowed UUCP commands. For
some versions of UUCP the list of commands is compiled into the code
and if a site doesn't have source this can be a problem. Frequently
the list of commands already includes "rnews" or some less important
command (finger?) can be patched to be "rnews". Having to patch in
"cunbatch" just makes this more difficult especially as "cunbatch" is a
longer string than any of the existing commands. It was for these sites
that the built in interpretation of batching by rnews was added.
Sending all news to "rnews" regardless of format may be cleaner but
it is not something to get excited about. I just wanted to keep someone
from sleepless nights worrying about converting to the new format. :-)
Jerry Aguirre @ Olivetti ATCbytebug@fritz.UUCP (Roger L. Long) (12/09/86)
In article <241@oliveb.UUCP> jerry@oliveb.UUCP (Jerry F Aguirre) writes: >I have seen a lot of mail traffic lately under the general heading of > > "I have 2.11 installed so I can switch to rnews instead of cunbatch" >or > "Do you have 2.11 installed and can I switch to rnews instead of > cunbatch" > >I leave it to the news gurus to correct me if I am wrong but there is no >advantage to sending compressed batches to remote!rnews instead of >remote!cunbatch. As one of the folks who recently contacted Jerry to ask about the state of news on his system, I can add a couple of possible advantages. I've configured 2.11 with both NICE and SPOOLNEWS defined. When you send compressed batches to remote!cunbatch, the batch is immediately uncompressed at full priority, and fed to rnews to spool in /usr/spool/news/.rnews. If you send them to remote!rnews, they are placed directly into /usr/spool/news/.rnews and then uncompressed at reduced priority when you execute "rnews -U" from your crontab entry. Since the decompression is delayed, this also reduced the amount of disk space required in the /usr/spool/news/.rnews directory. For these reasons, use of remote!rnews is preferred on a loaded system. Also, in terms of configuration, I have seperate lines in my crontab file for "sendbatch -c" and "sendbatch -c -o" and would like to move the systems all onto one line eventually. -- Roger L. Long FileNet Corp {hplabs,trwrb}!felix!bytebug
rick@seismo.CSS.GOV (Rick Adams) (12/09/86)
> Also, in terms of configuration, I have seperate lines in my crontab > file for "sendbatch -c" and "sendbatch -c -o" and would like to move > the systems all onto one line eventually. Note that you can replace: sendbatch -c site1 site2 site3 sendbatch -c -o site4 site5 with sendbatch -c site1 site2 site3 -o site4 site5 The flags apply to the rest of the line. ---rick
dave@lsuc.UUCP (12/09/86)
In article <2760@fritz.UUCP> bytebug@fritz.UUCP (Roger L. Long) writes: >Also, in terms of configuration, I have seperate lines in my crontab >file for "sendbatch -c" and "sendbatch -c -o" and would like to move >the systems all onto one line eventually. I call "/usr/lib/news/newsbatches" from crontab, so that crontab needn't be changed when details of our feeds change. Here's the newsbatches file. utmanitou is running 2.11, so doesn't need -o, and utzoo is a 16-bit machine which can only accept 12-bit compression. # newsbatches - call sendbatch on each site in turn for site in utzoo mnetor sickkids radha utmanitou do case $site in utzoo) flags="-b12 -o" ;; utmanitou) flags=" " ;; *) flags=-o ;; esac /usr/lib/news/sendbatch -c $flags $site done David Sherman -- { ihnp4!utzoo seismo!mnetor utai hcr decvax!utcsri } !lsuc!dave
roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) (12/11/86)
In article <42823@beno.seismo.CSS.GOV> rick@seismo.CSS.GOV (Rick Adams) writes: > Note that you can replace: > sendbatch -c site1 site2 site3 > sendbatch -c -o site4 site5 > with > sendbatch -c site1 site2 site3 -o site4 site5 Ooooh! How un-getopt(3)-ish! :-) -- Roy Smith, {allegra,cmcl2,philabs}!phri!roy System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016 "you can't spell deoxyribonucleic without unix!"