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From: williams@cs.umass.edu
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: problem installing bnews-2.11
Message-ID: <6501@dime.cs.umass.edu>
Date: 9 Nov 89 18:00:06 GMT
Sender: news@dime.cs.umass.edu
Distribution: usa
Organization: COINS, UMass, Amherst
Lines: 51

I am trying get news running at our site.  The bnews 2.11 software was
copied from uunet a couple of months ago. 

It ALMOST works.  All of the underlying uucp stuff is ok as we have
been getting our mail via uunet for a long time now.  I am polling
uunet for a newsfeed.  There is a problem with running rnews, on my
end it seems.  Our system is a masscomp 5700 running v4 of RTU.  Porting 
things to RTU has been nothing but trouble - it's kinda like SYSV, kinda 
like BSD, but has enough differences to make ports a real pain!

I changed very few of the defaults for the build - things like manually
and nonewgroups.  I have verified that the compressed news is being
received by copying the TM* file in /usr/spool/uucp/uunet to another
file, stripping off the first line and then running it through zcat.
Sure enough, there are the articles!  But because of the rnews problems,
the files transfered end up getting changed into an error message such
as the one I've included below. 

rnews lives in /usr/bin, the default, so I don't think an L.cmds file
is needed but I tried one anyway with no effect.  I tried both with and
without a PATH statement.  First I tried the one in misc/L.cmds of the
distribution and then tried editing it in various ways. I used strings
to look at uuxqt and found the strings /bin and /usr/bin so that's not
the problem.
ls -l of rnews shows:
-rwsr-sr-x	2	news	news	124036	/usr/bin/rnews
which is what it should be.  I normally run uucico from root but I
also tried running it from news and it didn't make any difference.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Copy of mail received after a recent attempt:

From uucp Mon Nov  6 18:47:04 EST 1989 remote from aai
remote execution	[uucp job uunetdekS3 (11/6-18:47:03)]
	rnews
execution permission denied to aai!root

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Do anyone have any idea what the problem is?  Someone at uunet said it
looked like uuxqt can't find rnews on my system but I don't see why
that would be.  Let me know if you need any more info about files,
protections, directories, etc for diagnostic purposes.

We have the O'Reilly book, but it doesn't go into enough detail for this 
sort of problem.  This is our first news install.  Maybe we should try C 
news instead?  RTU is a SYSV clone though.

Any help GREATLY appreciated!
Thanks!
Leo Pinard    c/o    williams@cs.umass.edu