newman@venus.ycc.yale.edu (01/25/90)
Ok....
A couple of slightly strange problems...bear with me...
1) For some strange reason, when I ran a checkgroups file through the
news facility when I first installed it, it correctly generated
the DCL script to make moderated groups moderated but the setting
didn't "stick" when the script was run to actually create the
newsgroups. Later when I noticed this I took the old checkgroups
posting and generated a DCL script manually (using AWK on a Un*x
box...(*blush*)) that would specifically set the moderated groups
to have moderated status. The script looked something like:
$ NEWS/NOSCREEN
SET NEWSGROUP alt.gourmand/MOD
SET NEWSGROUP rec.guns/MOD
.
.
.
EXIT
$ EXIT
When I issued the commands manually they work fine but when I run the
DCL script, while NEWS is entered properly and it never genreates any
error messages, it doesn't work either. Does ANYONE know what's going
on here?
2) For some reason the NNTP server, while functioning perfectly well in
"lurk" mode doesn't allow postings (yes I turned on posting, and
it says (Posting Ok) in the signon screen). The message is accepted
but when the final ".\n" is issued the server responds with:
441 Post: ..
and doesn't post the message. A little source code poking and
experimentation indicates that it properly parses the header
through the post_add_item() function up to the point that it
might complain about any of "From: Date: Newsgroups: Subject:
Message_ID: or Path:" lines missing (see source code for function
Post_add_item() for details). It also seems to make it to the
point in the function where it might trip on an Invalid Path
field. After that, it seems to go into a black hole. It fails
the same way regardless of whether the newsgroup is moderated or
not. One other curiousity...if I remove the file NEWS_POST.DEFAULTS
then the error message becomes:
441 Attempted posting to unauthorized newsgroups
for ANY group. An entirely commented out NEWS_POST.DEFAULTS
seems to correct this but the reason is not clear. Furtheremore
if there is a non-existent group that *should* be rejected by
the SYS filter (e.g. Newsgroups: bogus.bog.users) it seems to
still genereate the 441 Post: .. message noted above. Does
anyone have any ideas. I assume that others have working
NNTP servers so I suspect that there is something malconfigured
on my site that's causing things to act strangely and unintuitively.
I'm running ANU News V5.9.
Sorry for the long post...I couldn't explain it in any simpler terms.
-Andy Newman
(Systems Programmer, Yale Univ.)