terry@jgaltstl.UUCP (terry linhardt) (02/12/90)
As a new administrator, I have a question. Believe me, I have tried to find the answer in my manuals, and done a fair amount of experimentation on my machine to come up with the answer, but am now only frustrated. If someone can provide me with an answer, or direct me to the proper reading material, it will be most appreciated. I downloaded a copy of the 'newsgroups' file from my feed (uunet), and have found any number of groups which were not in my active file. Many of these I don't subscribe to. However, there are a number in, for instance, comp, which are valid newsgroups, but my machine does not recognize them as being valid. Therefore, they are discarded into 'junk'. What is the correct procedure for getting my 'active' file to be in-step with my feed's newsgroups file. -- |---------------------------------------------------------------------| | Terry Linhardt uunet!jgaltstl!terry (314) 772-4762 | |The Lafayette Group P.O. Box 2182 St. Louis MO 63104 | |---------------------------------------------------------------------|
dougw@fdls.UUCP (dougw) (02/14/90)
In article <196@jgaltstl.UUCP> terry@jgaltstl.UUCP (terry linhardt) writes: >I downloaded a copy of the 'newsgroups' file from my feed (uunet), >and have found any number of groups which were not in my active file. >Many of these I don't subscribe to. However, there are a number in, >for instance, comp, which are valid newsgroups, but my machine does >not recognize them as being valid. Therefore, they are discarded into >'junk'. What is the correct procedure for getting my 'active' file >to be in-step with my feed's newsgroups file. I am also a newer uunet subscriber and had the same problem. What you will need to do is to follow the procedure on pages 192 through 193 of the Managing uucp and Usenet Nutshell handbook that you received from uunet to manually add the news groups to your active file. Assuming your news library directory is /usr/lib/news and you wanted to add newsgroup gnu.announceStatus, the command would be: /usr/lib/news/inews -C gnu.announceStatus </dev/null In these pages, you will also find similar commands to remove newsgroups, change their moderated status, etc. Anyway, once you add the newsgroup to your active file, you will find that "all is well". The active file that was created when you installed your news software was the "standard" world wide usenet newsgroup distribution list. uunet carries quite a few additional newsgroups as you found by downloading their current newsgroup file. I was futher confused by the fact that when I installed my news software I selected that an automatic update of my active file should take place. But, it never did. uunet recently cleared this up for me by the following answer I received from email sent to uunet|postmaster: "there are no automatic postings of checkgroup messages any longer. too many people complained. you will have to read the various news.* groups to find the posted input to checkgroups and run the checkgroups at your end yourself." I have no idea what the complaints were. I have subscribed again to news.groups (hope this is the correct one) and will make any changes manually as desired. Hope this helps. Send me email if you have additional questions. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Doug Walker uunet!fdls!dougw Oregon Department of Agriculture (503) 378-3790 Food and Dairy Division 635 Capitol Street NE Salem, OR 97310-0110
tale@cs.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) (02/19/90)
In article <196@jgaltstl.UUCP> terry@jgaltstl.UUCP (terry linhardt) writes: > I downloaded a copy of the 'newsgroups' file from my feed (uunet), > and have found any number of groups which were not in my active file. > Many of these I don't subscribe to. However, there are a number in, > for instance, comp, which are valid newsgroups, but my machine does > not recognize them as being valid. Therefore, they are discarded into > 'junk'. What is the correct procedure for getting my 'active' file > to be in-step with my feed's newsgroups file. They are very likely "inet" (Internet) distribution groups. You might want to look at those groups and see whether you want inet at all. Then again, the thing is so leaky it's probably more worth your while just to sanctify them on your machine and take it all. In article <180@fdls.UUCP> dougw@fdls.UUCP (dougw) writes: > I was futher confused by the fact that when I installed my news > software I selected that an automatic update of my active file > should take place. But, it never did. uunet recently cleared this > up for me by the following answer I received from email sent to > uunet|postmaster: > "there are no automatic postings of checkgroup messages any longer. > too many people complained. you will have to read the various news.* > groups to find the posted input to checkgroups and run the > checkgroups at your end yourself." > I have no idea what the complaints were. I have subscribed again to > news.groups (hope this is the correct one) and will make any changes > manually as desired. The complaints were likely from admins that only wanted checkgroups done when they explicitly asked for them because checkgroups can also, as you say, update your active file automatically. Some people just don't like them, period, and choose to administer their systems without checkgroups. They also have an interesting side-effect; Eliot Lear occasionally sends out one for bionet which so far has never told me about anything out of whack with our bionet list but nevertheless points out inconsistencies between our lib/active and lib/newsgroups, almost always cases where I didn't manually add the group description to the newsgroups after the group creation. news.admin is the group you should subscribe to if you want to find the checkgroups message, and if you just want to keep up on admin'ing in general. Gene Spafford just posted the most recent version two nights ago. Dave
gordon@sneaky.UUCP (Gordon Burditt) (02/27/90)
>I am also a newer uunet subscriber and had the same problem. What you will >need to do is to follow the procedure on pages 192 through 193 of the Managing >uucp and Usenet Nutshell handbook that you received from uunet to manually add >the news groups to your active file. Assuming your news library directory is >/usr/lib/news and you wanted to add newsgroup gnu.announceStatus, the command >would be: > > /usr/lib/news/inews -C gnu.announceStatus </dev/null PLEASE! be careful with this! The default distribution for newgroup messages on some news systems is "world", and your newgroup message will propogate all over the net. If your group isn't supposed to be net-wide, you will be flamed for it. If your group isn't just local creation of an existing group, you will be flamed for not using the proper group creation procedures (which involve a proposal, a discussion period, and voting). Let's make that: /usr/lib/news/inews -d local -C gnu.announceStatus < /dev/null Further, if "gnu.announceStatus" is supposed to be moderated, this is going to unmoderate it (and if you used the first version, it will happen all over the net!). So let's change it to: /usr/lib/news/inews -d local -C gnu.announceStatus moderated < /dev/null Gordon L. Burditt sneaky.lonestar.org!gordon
tale@cs.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) (02/28/90)
In article <28553@sneaky.UUCP> gordon@sneaky.UUCP (Gordon Burditt) writes: > Let's make that: > /usr/lib/news/inews -d local -C gnu.announceStatus < /dev/null > Further, if "gnu.announceStatus" is supposed to be moderated, this is > going to unmoderate it (and if you used the first version, it will happen > all over the net!). So let's change it to: > /usr/lib/news/inews -d local -C gnu.announceStatus moderated < /dev/null I believe the original poster was trying to indicate moderatedness with the Status suffix; of course, I could be wrong. This isn't especially the reason I am posting though. This is: Please don't assume things about other people's software set-up when there is a a very good possibility that your assumption is wrong; if you do assume something, then state what you are assuming. For the previous two articles in this thread it would be akin to, "I am assuming you are a B News site." Standard C News sites should use addgroup to create groups locally. Syntax is "$NEWBIN/maint/addgroup group flag". It doesn't fire up any extra inews->relaynews->ctl-programme procedure; it just goes right to the active file and makes the necessary addition. I do not know how groups are created locally in other news systems. Dave -- (setq mail '("tale@cs.rpi.edu" "tale@ai.mit.edu" "tale@rpitsmts.bitnet")) "If a machine can be made so that an idiot can use it, then only an idiot will use it." -- Tadao Ichikawa
ajc@suna.cc.ic.ac.uk (Andrew Clipston) (03/01/90)
Hello there,
I am a pretty new user on this system and I am using the reader rn
When I tried to enter a follow up article in a conference, a message
came up saying I had better read mod.announce.newusers
However when I tried I was told that this conference simply didn't
exist!.Can someone help me please?
Also if I want to read messages that are in conference that says it
has 0 unread messages in it, I was told to get into that conference and
type P to read any previous messages. However it won't let me...any
advice or am I just being thick?
Thanks
Andy
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