How to setup backbone site?

[Bob Pickles]

In article <1155 at tnessd.UUCP> mechjgh at tnessd.sbc.com (Greg Hackney) writes:

>>In article <148 at perle.UUCP> bob at perle.UUCP (Bob Pickles) writes:
>>
>>When we received OSx 4.4c there was a change to the news
>>facility with a new file called mailpaths. In this
>>file there is a definition for setting up the 'backbone'
>>site. No matter how we setup the backbone site, every week
>>we get a message in the weekly news report that says:
>>
>>   Can't find backbone in /usr/lib/news/mailpaths
>>
>>Why do we get this message? We have tried commenting out
>>this line but to no avail. The response back from our
>>Pyramid supplier is that Pyramid says this is public
>>domain software and they don't support it and don't have an answer?
>
>A possible problem might be this:
>
>The code that reads that file uses the sscanf() function, and
>reads in strings in pairs of two. Since it can read across newlines, all
>data in that file needs to be matched up in even pairs of strings,
>even comment lines.
>

Yes this is this solution to my problem. Yesterday someone sent me
the code loop that scans the file and found this to be the case.
If the fscanf() function doesn't return two pairs of strings you
get this error message. When this error occurs it's not that
it's not finding the backbone line it's complaining that my
comment lines don't have just two strings.

>With nothing else in the file, but this, it oughta work:
>
>backbone	mnetor!uunet!%s
>
>--
>Greg Hackney

To fix my problem I put the backbone line at the top of the file.

Thanks to everyone who sent ideas and code to help us fix this.

If I had waited for Pyramid to tell us what the problem was
I would have waited months for an answer.

Bob Pickles

-- 
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*  >>>>>>>>>  Bob Pickles : Pyramid System Administrator <<<<<<<<<  *
*  >>>>>>>>>  UUCP : ...!uunet!mnetor!perle!bob          <<<<<<<<<  *
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