CNews problems

[Henry Spencer]

In article <13657 at reed.UUCP> bob at reed.UUCP (Bob Ankeney) writes:
>     I have recently been trying to install Cnews on a pair of systems...

A generic note, by the way:  C News problems will get more prompt attention
if they are posted to news.software.b or mailed to the address given in
the documentation.  We don't always read comp.sources.bugs frequently.

> Why isn't there just a single doit.root script with appropriate chown's?

Geoff and I belong to the old school of sysadmins, who consider root
privileges dangerous and use them as sparingly as possible to avoid costly
mistakes.  In particular, we are *very* reluctant to execute other peoples'
code as root unless we can proofread it first.  Hence the *.root scripts
are small and short so you can easily read them and tell that they're not
doing anything evil, and nothing else needs to run as root.

I know of nothing that would break if you just ran everything as root,
although it's not something I would ever do.

>     I tried applying the first Cnews patch, and found that all but the
>last few patches had already been applied to the release I pulled off.

This is an ongoing nuisance, but it's difficult to avoid with any widely
distributed software.  Things may be mitigated a little bit when FTP from
zoo.toronto.edu becomes available, at which point at least Internet sites
will be able to get a copy that is *guaranteed* current.

>     The first problem I had was that Ultrix df has two header lines,
>so the free space calculation in spacefor didn't work.  Changing nr to
>3 in the awk expression solved this.

Yeah, DEC compounded Berkeley's botch by messing up df output further.
You'd think nobody ever considered that *programs* might want to use
the output.  There is probably going to be an Ultrix df as part of the
distribution, along with one or two others, as soon as I find time to
go through my low-priority-to-do queue.

>     When I ran mkhistory, it exited after finding <trash at swill> entries
>in history.n.  These entries were all empty files.  Is this appropriate
>behaviour? ...

The current version issues a warning and continues.  This problem turned
out to be rather more common than we'd originally thought, justifying
intelligent action rather than "oh my, something incomprehensible has
happened, better call in human help".

>     Also, several of the installed shell scripts had their execute
>bit set, but not the read bit (e.g. mode 751).  These scripts are owned
>by bin.bin, and executed by news.  Perhaps the install scripts should
>do a chmod +rx instead of a chmod +x so this won't happen.

I'd appreciate it if you could investigate and find out how this happened,
actually.  The only way I know of that stuff could get created unreadable
is if your umask was set to turn off the read bits, and chmod will *not*
override that (i.e., "chmod +rx" probably wouldn't have helped).  I don't
understand why somebody would set a umask like 026 (turn off ----w-rw-)
rather than 027 (turn off ----w-rwx); is that what happened?

>     Another problem was that uucp doesn't have write permission on
>the in.coming directory (which is owned by news.news)...

This should not be an issue if newsspool is setuid-news, as it should be.
Can you investigate?

>     I didn't look too carefully at the explist file, and started to use
>it as-is.  Unfortunately, the '@' field proved to be a problem as the
>recommended crontab additions for doexpire did not specify a '-a'...

Oops.  Hmm.  I'm going to have to revise things a bit so the default
stuff is consistent.  I guess most people customize explist before running
expire; this one hasn't been reported before.

>     Running the regression test in the expire directory, I have a problem
>with superkludge and get the following:
> ...
>./superkludge: message-id format problems:
> ...
>I haven't looked into this yet.  Any ideas?

We've seen this one before; it probably means your system's awk has a bug.
Superkludge is doing a sweep of its data with awk for sanity checking
before doing anything drastic, and some versions of awk misbehave when
you ask them to do a pattern match on a nonexistent field.  The 14-Sep-1989
patch fixed superkludge to avoid this.
-- 
Mars can wait:  we've barely   |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
started exploring the Moon.    | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu