Newsgroups: news.software.nntp Path: utzoo!utstat!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!math.lsa.umich.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!sci.ccny.cuny.edu!phri!news From: roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) Subject: Problem with nntp/C-news/nfs interactions Message-ID: <1990Jul11.164853.1715@phri.nyu.edu> Sender: news@phri.nyu.edu (News System) Organization: Public Health Research Institute, New York City Date: Wed, 11 Jul 90 16:48:53 GMT We run nntp 1.5.7 and C-news (most recent patch, 14-Sep-1989) on a Vax-11/750 running MtXinu 4.3BSD/NFS. As a temporary measure to gain some space after being off the net for a week and getting flooded with news when we got reconnected, I recently mounted /usr/spool/news/in.coming remotely. What I actually did was to make a temporary file system on wombat (a Sun-3/180 running SunOS-3.5.2) called /news and mount wombat:/news as /usr/spool/news/temp, mv in.coming/* to temp, and make a symlink from in.coming to temp. Got that? :-) All the 40 or so Mbytes of spooled news waiting in in.coming eventually got processed. But, when new news would come in via nntp, it would just fall into a black hole. The occasional article we still get via uucp would get processed without any trouble. I could see the nntp traffic on the ethernet using tcpdump or netscope, and could see nntpd running on the vax when I did ps, but no files would show up in in.coming, no entries would be made in any of the news or nntp log files or the errlog files. Eventually I figured out that what was going on was that nntpd was running as root and root permissions do not extend accross NFS mount points. One question this brings up is, does nntp really have to run as root? Could I run nntp as news instead? Another is, why didn't nntp log any error messages anywhere? /usr/lib/news/nntperrlog would be the obvious place, but there isn't anything there about getting write failures. There are some other error messages in nntperrlog about some random badness in my history file, so I know nntpd was able to write onto nntperrlog. -- Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016 roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy "Arcane? Did you say arcane? It wouldn't be Unix if it wasn't arcane!"