henry (01/21/83)
Dave Clemans makes an excellent point: news/uucp is not really a 100% reliable mechanism. It can be much improved by one trick I mentioned some time ago: make your "rnews" not a link to inews but a shellfile which reports errors to somewhere where humans will read them. Like this: : '@(#)rnews 1.6 of 16 Dec 82' PATH=/bin:/usr/bin ; export PATH tee /tmp/rn$$ | rnewsb >/tmp/rnm$$ 2>&1 if test -s /tmp/rnm$$ && grep -s -v '^Duplicate article ' then ( echo rnews ; cat /tmp/rnm$$ ; \ echo ----- ; cat /tmp/rn$$ ; echo ----- ) | mail uucp fi rm -f /tmp/rn$$ /tmp/rnm$$ (SCCS id in a comment, standardize PATH, tee the article into a tempfile as you feed it to the "real" rnews and route error messages from same into another tempfile, then check to see if you got any error messages [ignoring "Duplicate article"], and if so, mail the messages and the article text to a human-read mailbox.)
fair (01/22/83)
Regarding shell scripts to process news: At ucbonyx, we get news from ucbvax over a 9600 baud Berknet link, and when we had a delivermail alias to process the news as it came in, the process table would overflow, and the system would grind away until the deluge stopped. Heaven help users who were trying to use the system at that time. Now we have a \very/ elaborate csh script that runs once a day at 0500 PST, and processes the articles one by one through uurec. It counts up errors and Duplicate articles and mails a note to the `operator' when it is done. This way news costs no more than delivering a letter, (plus some time at 0500), and we have a handle on our errors as well. One error that is frequent and fixable is "inews: Inbound news is garbled." 99% of those were articles which had return addresses so long that inews overflowed the buffer. With some editing, they go through inews OK. As an alternate solution (i.e. simple) for sites that find news iss grinding their systems into dust, create a mailbox for rnews and cat the whole thing through uurec at some ungodly hour of the morning when nobody will care. We're using 2.8 news, and have tested this. Uurec can handle multiple articles at a time through a pipe. Erik E. Fair ucbvax!fair fair@Berkeley ucbonyx system coordinator