A bunch of questions about UUCP on the Unix PC

[Chris Siebenmann]

In article <802 at oswego.Oswego.EDU> ostroff at oswego.UUCP (Boyd Ostroff) writes:
...
>5) On a slightly different but related topic, are there any (preferably
>public-domain) mail programs available?  I don't see any listed in
>THE STORE! catalog.  The mail(1) provided with the system is pretty limited.
>Is anything available for SysV through anonymus ftp? 

 First, if you aren't already running pathalias and smail, you should
be. Both came up with absolutely no problems here, and have been
completely trouble-free so far. Pathalias isn't really necessary,
since all you use it for is to generate a path-database file which is
easy to do by hand if you're going to forward unrecognized addresses
to another system for address resolution.

 There are a couple of mail programs available. I brought up elm here
briefly, and it seemed to work OK (although I've heard reports of it
changing the group of mailboxes in /usr/mail when it shouldn't). It
needed a bit of work to get the configuration and setup right; the
configuration script it comes with wasn't sufficient. Mush came across
comp.sources.unix recently; I don't know how easy it would be to bring
it up on a 3B1.

 I'm currently running MH, which is large but fits very well with how
I like to deal with mail. It needed some porting to get it running
under SysV with smail; I can make the patches needed available to
interested people.

>6) FINALLY, I would eventually like to get USENET news on my 3B1.  Is there
>a version of rn especially for the Unix PC, or is it generic enough that I
>can get the sources running under Ultrix from my local vax and compile it 
>under SysV?  I'm really only interested in a handful of newsgroups - how
>much disk space will the sources/binaries/whatever eat up?  How much will
>it hog my cpu/disk when it runs?

 rn runs fine on the 3B1 (with a minor change to cope with the fact
that you can't open /dev/tty read-only if you're calling in through
/dev/ph[01]). Larry Wall's configuration script handled everything
just fine. The B news source, on the other hand, needed some tweaking
before the configuration came out right (the supplied 3B1/7300
configuration wasn't quite right).

 The news binaries and support files take up about a meg here, and
then there's the news articles themselves. Compressed, the news
sources take up two floppies; there's no need to keep them online if
you're low in disk space. There's a fairly large performance hit when
B news starts running to receive or expire articles; some of this will
probably go away with the dbm-for-SysV-news code posted to alt.sources
recently. 

-- 
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			Number Ten Ox, "Bridge of Birds"
Chris Siebenmann		{uunet!mnetor!lsuc,utgpu}!ncrcan!ziebmef!cks
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