news feed over Ethernet: how?

[Herbert Niederle]

Another way to exchange news over an Ethernet without using the Berkeley 4.3
uucp-t-protocol between local-node A and neighbour-node B works as follows:

1) Create on the remote node B the file A.cmd in the batched-directory 
   (mostly /usr/spool/news/batched/A.cmd) with the following contents:

	rsh A -l news /usr/.../rnews

2) Create the analogous file B.cmd on your machine A 
   (mostly /usr/spool/news/batched/B.cmd) with the following contents:

	rsh B -l news /usr/.../rnews

3) Add the entry "B news" on machine A in the news' .rhosts-file
4) Add the entry "A news" on machine B in the news' .rhosts-file
   
After all this is done, you can exchange news between host A and host B, 
for example on host A, by executing the commands: 

	sendbatch B 				(from A -> B)
	
	rsh B -l news -n /usr/.../sendbatch A 	(from B -> A)

You can bring these two commands into a shell-script, which for ex. tests
such things like, is the remote host up, have both enough space, before
starting the transfer.

We use this method under ULTRIX-2.2 and b-news 2.11.14 and it works great.
If you use sendbatch and during the transfer one machine goes down, then the
next sendbatch-call to that machine will continue ONLY NEARLY at the "break-
point". It may be, if the receiver went down first, that still about 1 to 3 
topics are sent until the sender stops, and if you do nothing, these three 
topics would be lost.

You can solve this problem this way:

Look before you execute the command "sendbatch B" for a B.work file in the
"batched-directory". If there is one, then the former "sentbatch B" wasn't
completet. If you always made a copy of the "batched-file" B before starting
sendbatch, then you can correct the B.work file by comparing the last copy of
the "batched-file" B with the news-logfile log on system B.
Replace the B.work file with the corrected one, execute "sendbatch B" and no 
topic would be lost.
 
Because of 3) and 4) this is only recommended, if both news-users on 
machine A and B can trust each other.

Hope this helps.

Herbert Niederle	Inst. fuer Informatik, Technische Universitaet Muenchen
			Postfach 20 24 20	  8000 Muenchen 2, West Germany
niederle at lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de	          Tel: +49 89 2105 8197
niederle%lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de@ {relay.cs.net, unido.uucp}