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From: warlock@ecst.csuchico.edu (John Kennedy)
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
Subject: Re: NNTP 1.5.10 / Cnews 15-Dec-1990 / Stupid UNIX exec
Summary: anne.jones "who am i", and how to avoid it
Keywords: anne.jones
Message-ID: <1991Jan31.002827.20517@seka.ecst.csuchico.edu>
Date: 31 Jan 91 00:28:27 GMT
Sender: news@seka.ecst.csuchico.edu (USENET News)
Organization: California State University, Chico
Lines: 41


  Several people provided helpful suggestions to my solution, and it now
works fine.  I thought I'd summarize for others:

From:	David Macklem

	-->	The nntpd daemon, when posting a news article, sets the USER and
	-->	LOGNAME environment variables to something like 'usenet' and
	-->	then exec's inews (this will prevent anne.jones from going
	-->	through hoops to figure out the USER and LOGNAME).
	-->	Unfortunately, when the nntpd daemon exec's inews it passes
	-->	the wrong environment.

	  Seems like a reasonable solution.  If this is indeed the culpret,
	and a widespread one at that, perhaps the NNTP gods can patch it?  (-:

From:	Brendan Kehoe

	  Brendan approached it a different way -- he wrote a "who am i"
	equivalent that didn't have who's limitiations.  He offered source for
	it, so if you have this problem he'll probably mail it to you.

From:	Ian G Batten

	-->	i have basically the same situation as you --- my main news
	-->	engine is running v.3.2.  my fix is crude and effective

	case "$USER" in
#	"")	USER="`who am i </dev/null |	# last resort: use userid
#			sed -e 's/[	 ].*//' -e '/!/s/^.*!//' `" ;;
	"")	USER="`id | sed 's/^[^(]*(//;s/).*//'`" ;;
	esac

	-->	i just commented out the whoami.  it works ok --- remote Pnews
	-->	generates the From: and I just use the results of the id to
	-->	get the Sender:

  I ended up using Ian's version, mostly because it was involved the least
typing and therefor could be tried the quickest.  It works, as this article
successfully hitting the net will prove.  If it doesn't, I can eat my words,
repost, and you'll never know... (-: