Xref: utzoo news.software.b:3613 news.software.nntp:426
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.software.nntp
Path: utzoo!utstat!geoff
From: geoff@utstat.uucp (Geoff Collyer)
Subject: Re: B/C News woes
Message-ID: <1989Nov22.075837.12240@utstat.uucp>
Organization: Statistics, U. of Toronto
References: <1989Nov17.162448.22026@relay.nswc.navy.mil> <1989Nov21.140935.1224@relay.nswc.navy.mil> <256A4010.5066@rpi.edu>
Date: Wed, 22 Nov 89 07:58:37 GMT

David C Lawrence:
> [If it's not going to make the directory, could it at least give a
> little better message about what problem it encountered?]

If you are running an up-to-date C news (Nov 13, though the relevant
fix was earlier), you always get an error message in $NEWSCTL/errlog
when relaynews exits with non-zero status, unless it encountered an
error (usually due to memory exhaustion in prelude()) before it could
establish that the standard file descriptors were open, or it was
killed by a signal.  Decoding the bit patterns of relaynews's exit
status is not required.

We are preparing a list of "commonly-encountered problems".  The number
one problem people have with relaynews is that their
$NEWSCTL/bin/config doesn't match their libcnews/config.c or they have
environment variables set to override those values.  This is normal
during testing or some forms of parallel operation, but it does cause a
loss of setuid-privileges to avoid spoofing, so you have to be prepared
to compensate, perhaps by fiddling permissions on files owned by "news"
or equivalent.
-- 
Geoff Collyer		utzoo!utstat!geoff, geoff@utstat.toronto.edu