CNews problems

[Bob Ankeney]

     I have recently been trying to install Cnews on a pair of systems:
A MicroVAX II running Ultrix V2.3, and a Sun4/330 running SunOS 4.0.3.
I'm not too sure how the Sun version is doing, since the VAX provides the
feed, and that's where I seem to have the most problems.  I'll describe
some of the problems I encountered and how I solved them, then describe
those I still see.

     I encountered a lot of permission problems installing Cnews with
the doit.* scripts, executing them su'ed to whatever.  Why isn't there
just a single doit.root script with appropriate chown's?

     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.

     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.

     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?  We used to have problems with our news directory filling up
which is why these files were zero-length.  I removed them, and all seems
well now.

     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.

     Another problem was that uucp doesn't have write permission on
the in.coming directory (which is owned by news.news).  I've had some
other permission-related problems of this nature too.  Is there a
recommended solution for this?

     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'.  So
doexpire failed initially.  Since we don't plan to archive anything, I just
changed the '@' to a '-', and also tossed some other unneeded lines.


On the unsolved side:

     Running the regression test in the expire directory, I have a problem
with superkludge and get the following:

: "and that's mkhistory done, finally try superkludge"
test -r arts/foo/1
test -r arts/foo/10
NEWSARTS=`pwd`/arts NEWSCTL=`pwd` NEWSBIN=`pwd`/nbin ./superkludge foo
./superkludge: message-id format problems:
1 <wont1> 
99 <multi99> 
test ! -r arts/foo/1
*** Error code 1

Stop.

I haven't looked into this yet.  Any ideas?


     Running newsdaily by hand, I get:
find: bad status < * >

I haven't looked into why this happens, either.


     At any rate, we now have some freshly unbatched news, so things are
looking up.  Any help on the remaining problems would be appreciated.

	Bob Ankeney

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Bob Ankeney                    | "Wise men talk because they have         |
...!tektronix!reed!bob         |  something to say; fools, because        |
...!tektronix!bob at reed.BITNET  |  they have to say something."            |
...!tektronix!reed!arnav!bob   |                                          |
                               | "He who talks by the yard and acts by    |
                               |  the inch should be kicked by the foot." |
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