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From: jimb@silvlis.com (Jim Budler)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Conversion to C news
Message-ID: <1990Sep1.093729.14928@silvlis.com>
Date: 1 Sep 90 09:37:29 GMT
References: <138@tdatirv.UUCP> <1990Aug31.155234.8788@zoo.toronto.edu>
Sender: usenet@silvlis.com (USENET news maint)
Reply-To: jimb@silvlis.com (Jim Budler)
Organization: Silvar-Lisco,Inc. Sunnyvale Ca.
Lines: 68

In article <1990Aug31.155234.8788@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:
>In article <138@tdatirv.UUCP> sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen) writes:
>>	In general, what kind of problems can I expect converting mid-stream
>>from B to C news?  Would I likely lose any articles? Or have to alert my
>>news feed of changes?  Alternatively, once I have built C news, does it just
>>drop into place in place of B, or is some effort required to smooth the
>>transition?

Turn off your newsflow during the transition. i.e.:

Shut off your inbound ports ( I just switched off the modems ), and make sure
nntpd wont run if you receive news this way.

Turn off your outbound news. If possible make sure all news queues are flushed.
If you don't do this, your feeds may lose news.

The uucp queues do not need to be flushed.

Turn off your news related cron entries, as they will be different afterwards.

Remember to turn everything back on afterwards 8^)

The location of inews and rnews is a problem. Under Bnews inews was in
/usr/lib/news, and rnews was in /usr/bin, and was probably a link to
/usr/lib/news/inews. Under Cnews, both programs reside in a normal
path, default /usr/bin.

If you are running an nntp based newsreader, it may already have a normal path
inews, perhaps /usr/local/bin/inews.

If so you must insure it is specifically invoked by the newsreader with
a complete path or some posting problems may occur.

>
>The only probable rough spots in the transition are that (a) the transition
>process is not as well documented as it should be, and (b) you will have to
>learn how to run a somewhat different news system.

Here, here! Or is that Understatement,understatement!?

I've done the transition twice now, at two different sites. The problems
were:

	Forgot to turn off newsflow. What do you do with those batches?

	Forgot to flush the news queue. What do you do with *those* batches?

	Forgot about those nntp mini-inews. Some local posting failures
	resulted. Fortunately, the 'news' account has a default path,
	so newsflow didn't suffer. Actually, that may be wrong, since I
	believe Cnews has a path setting mechanism within it to insure
	that it finds the correct executables.

	Overall, I think little problem.

>-- 
>TCP/IP: handling tomorrow's loads today| Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
>OSI: handling yesterday's loads someday|  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry


Overall: I'm extremely pleased with the improved performance, and once
installed, and the expire rules stabilized, I haven't touched it in months.

jim

--
Jim Budler          jimb@silvlis.com       +1.408.991.6061
Silvar-Lisco, Inc. 703 E. Evelyn Ave. Sunnyvale, Ca. 94086