Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!linac!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!n8emr!colnet!res
From: res@colnet.uucp (Rob Stampfli)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: I need help with a relaynews problem...
Message-ID: <1991Feb16.155923.6597@colnet.uucp>
Date: 16 Feb 91 15:59:23 GMT
References: <365@camdev.comm.mot.com?>
Distribution: na
Organization: Little to None
Lines: 21

In article <365@camdev.comm.mot.com?> sscott@camdev.comm.mot.com (Steve Scott) writes:
>When I use postnews (or :post from within nn), I get the following error
>
>relaynews: error writing `/usr/lib/news/history', probably the disk filled (Error 0)

My guess is you (or your system administrator) probably limits the size of
the files users can write, via the ulimit shell builtin.  Usually, relaynews
is invoked from cron, which suffers no such limitation.  However, the one
time relaynews is invoked from a user's account is when that user post news.
In this case, Unix passes the ulimit faithfully thru and causes the appending
of the article ID to the history file to bomb out.

Luckily for sV Unix, the cnews authors, in their infinite wisdom, provided
a set-uid invoking function 'setnewsids', which can be easily recompiled
to bump the ulimit to a reasonable value.  I suggest putting the line

	(void) ulimit(2, 30000L);

next to the umask() line.
-- 
Rob Stampfli, 614-864-9377, res@kd8wk.uucp (osu-cis!kd8wk!res), kd8wk@n8jyv.oh