[unix-pc.general] making "expire" work

darren@bacchus (Darren Friedlein) (03/08/88)

I know there are better places to post messages of this genre, but I only
get the unix-pc groups right now, so here goes:

I've been trying to "expire" messages (now reaching 2 meg - just unix-pc.*!),
but every time I run expire, no matter what the parameters, I get the message:

expire: Cannot get NEWSGRP gr entry

Several things could be causing this (peculiarities with my news directories
in particular), but I think it's more likely related to a missing file or
something like that.  Can anyone help me?  Reply through mail or
unix-pc.general if it's of general interest.

-Darren

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ken@maxepr.UUCP (Ken Brassler) (03/09/88)

In article <260@bacchus> darren@bacchus (Darren Friedlein) writes:
>
>but every time I run expire, no matter what the parameters, I get the message:
>
>expire: Cannot get NEWSGRP gr entry
>

If you look though expire.c, you'll see that this error message is
produced when a call to getgrnam() fails. getgrnam() is a library
function, explained in getgrent(3c), which tries to find the group
id, "NEWSGRP", in the /etc/group file. Obviously, the group is not
there.

So, find out what group NEWSGRP is, (ls -l /usr/lib/news) then add it
to /etc/group.
-- 

Ken Brassler {ihnp4|qantel|pyramid|lll-crg}!pacbell!maxepr!ken

kevin@kosman.UUCP (Kevin O'Gorman) (03/11/88)

In article <260@bacchus> darren@bacchus (Darren Friedlein) writes:
>
>I know there are better places to post messages of this genre, but I only
>get the unix-pc groups right now, so here goes:
>
>I've been trying to "expire" messages (now reaching 2 meg - just unix-pc.*!),
>but every time I run expire, no matter what the parameters, I get the message:
>
>expire: Cannot get NEWSGRP gr entry
>
>Several things could be causing this (peculiarities with my news directories
>in particular), but I think it's more likely related to a missing file or
>something like that.  Can anyone help me?  Reply through mail or
>unix-pc.general if it's of general interest.

I had the same thing happen a while back when I was thrashing around trying
to get everything from my backups restored onto a new, living machine.

There's a cpp variable NEWSGRP defined in one of the *.h files, which is the
name for the group-id that the news programs will sgid to.  You need to make
sure that the group is defined in /etc/group.  For my system, it looks like
this:

	root:NONE:0:root
	other:NONE:1:daemon,lp
	bin:NONE:2:root,bin,daemon
	sys:NONE:3:root,bin,sys,adm
	adm:NONE:4:root,adm,daemon
	mail:NONE:6:root,uucp,nuucp,uucpadm
	users:NONE:100:tutor,install
!>>	news:NONE:200:root,uucp,news,install,kevin

I hope this helps.
-- 

Kevin O'Gorman ( kevin@kosman ) voice: 805-984-8042
  Vital Computer Systems, 5115 Beachcomber, Oxnard, CA  93035