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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!genrad!decvax!decwrl!glacier!reid
From: reid@glacier.ARPA (Brian Reid)
Newsgroups: net.news.sa
Subject: Re: Are there problems if expire runs while news is being received?
Message-ID: <1785@glacier.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 26-Nov-85 17:39:07 EST
Article-I.D.: glacier.1785
Posted: Tue Nov 26 17:39:07 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 28-Nov-85 04:33:32 EST
References: <186@pluto.UUCP> <5443@allegra.UUCP> <2054@gatech.CSNET>
Reply-To: reid@glacier.UUCP (Brian Reid)
Organization: Stanford University, Computer Systems Lab
Lines: 86
Summary: 

In article <2054@gatech.CSNET> spaf@gatech.UUCP (Gene Spafford) writes:
>Rick Adams (rick@seismo.css.gov) posted a very nice fix to this
>problem some time back.  Since it is small, I will post it again
>(here).

Rick's fix is not good enough, for 2 reasons:
  (1) It doesn't prevent local postings and "recnews" postings during an
      expire. Now that the new mod.stupidname groups are the norm, we
      aren't doing so much recnews as we used to, but back in the good
      old "fa.*" days this was a big problem.
  (2) It causes dreadful problems in an ethernet environment when the
      "rdist" program is used. This might not bother many of you, but
      it sure bothered us. If somebody turns off news on the master
      machine, and then rdist runs, then the turned-off version of news
      gets distributed to all of the client machines.

I don't yet have a fix for inews/recnews, but here is my modified rnews that
fixes the rdist problem. You'll probably want to run with the 
article-eater-log code turned off, as the article-eater bug is officially
fixed now.

#! /bin/sh
: This is a shar archive.  Extract with sh, not csh.
echo x - newson
cat > newson << '15935!Funky!Stuff!'
#! /bin/sh
#
# This shell script un-does the effect of "newsoff". It takes any stored
# news that accumulated while news was turned off, and runs it through.
# See also $NEWSLIB/newsoff and /usr/bin/rnews
#
#	Brian Reid, October 1985

PATH=.:/usr/stanford/bin:/usr/ucb:/usr/bin:/bin:
NEWSLIB=/usr/lib/news
NEWSSPOOL=/usr/spool/news

rm -f $NEWSLIB/rnews.lock
cd $NEWSSPOOL
ls -tr1 |\
 grep \^rnews. |\
 awk "{print \"$NEWSLIB/rnews < \",\$1,\"; rm -f \",\$1,\"\"}" |\
 /bin/sh
15935!Funky!Stuff!
echo x - newsoff
cat > newsoff << '15935!Funky!Stuff!'
#! /bin/sh
#
# This shell script turns off incoming news so that system maintenance runs
# can continue uninterrupted. See also $NEWSLIB/newson and /usr/bin/rnews.
#
#	Brian Reid, October 1985

NEWSLIB=/usr/lib/news
if [ -f $NEWSLIB/rnews.lock ]; 
then
    echo "News is already off."
else
    echo "News disabled by" $USER at "`date`" > $NEWSLIB/rnews.lock
    cat $NEWSLIB/rnews.lock
fi
15935!Funky!Stuff!
echo x - /usr/bin/rnews
cat > rnews << '15935!Funky!Stuff!'
#! /bin/sh
#
# This shell script replaces /usr/bin/rnews. It tests for the presence of a
# lock file. If the lock file is there, then the news is hidden away in a
# spool directory instead of being processed. The lock file is set by the
# "newsoff" command and cleared by the "newson" command. It expects the real
# rnews to be a hard link to /usr/lib/news/inews.
#
#	Brian Reid, October 1985

NEWSLIB=/usr/lib/news
NEWSSPOOL=/usr/spool/news
if [ -f $NEWSLIB/rnews.lock ]
then
    exec /bin/cat > $NEWSSPOOL/rnews.$$
else
    exec $NEWSLIB/rnews 2>>$NEWSLIB/article-eater-log
fi
15935!Funky!Stuff!
-- 
	Brian Reid	decwrl!glacier!reid
	Stanford	reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA