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From: lidl@eng.umd.edu (Kurt J. Lidl)
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
Subject: Re: Problem with nntp/C-news/nfs interactions
Message-ID: <1990Jul11.211208.21178@eng.umd.edu>
Date: 11 Jul 90 21:12:08 GMT
References: <1990Jul11.164853.1715@phri.nyu.edu>
Sender: news@eng.umd.edu (The News System)
Organization: College Of Engineering, Univ. of MD, College Park
Lines: 30

In article <1990Jul11.164853.1715@phri.nyu.edu> roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes:
>[problem description & solution deleted]

>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.

I ran into similar problems a long time ago.  I now run my nntpd as
news.  I'm thoroughly convinced that it is evil to do otherwise.
I don't want the news system to be pukeing random files into /, and
so forth (it has happened here, folks).

The error messages in about random badness in your history file are
a bug in nntp.  I just tracked this down.  For C News, there is
a possibility that the history file will have a entry of
mess-id		(tab)	arrival-time-(return)

i.e. -- only one tab in the line for an expired message.
NNTP thinks that anything that doesn't have two tabs per line in
the history file is corrupted...  There's a one line fix in
the misc.c file of NNTP to make it stop logging these messages.

>Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute

--
/* Kurt J. Lidl (lidl@eng.umd.edu) | Unix is the answer, but only if you */
/* UUCP: uunet!eng.umd.edu!lidl    | phrase the question very carefully. */