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Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!ut-sally!utah-cs!utah-gr!uplherc!nrc-ut!nrcvax!chris
From: chris@nrcvax.UUCP (Chris Grevstad)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: How to prevent low-grade uucp work during daytime?
Message-ID: <1119@nrcvax.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 14-Aug-87 23:53:26 EDT
Article-I.D.: nrcvax.1119
Posted: Fri Aug 14 23:53:26 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 17-Aug-87 04:37:30 EDT
References: <3572@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Reply-To: chris@minnie.UUCP (Chris Grevstad)
Organization: Frobozo Items Co. Inc. Ltd.
Lines: 61
Keywords: uucico grade time-to-call restrictions

mangler@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu (System Mangler) says:
>[4.3 BSD]
>
>Our uucp gateway is overloaded during the daytime, so I want to
>limit the times of day that low-grade work such as news can be
>transferred, while still allowing mail at any time.

	Well, we have  the same problem.  We also  had (still have,  actually,
but this helps) the problem of running out of  disk space, especially  when we
feed news to multiple sites.  My solution was to hack on  4.3BSD UUCP a little
to have it check a file in /usr/lib/uucp called EXECFILE for  a command to run
when there is no more  work to be found  for the particular site.  The command
is run  via system().   After the command is run  and there is still   no more
work, then uucico exits.  Sample file follows:

	sddmt1 Any /usr/lib/news/sendbatch -O -c -s80000 sddmt1
	kosman Any /usr/lib/news/sendbatch -O -c -s60000 kosman
	marge Any /usr/lib/news/sendbatch -O -c -s60000 marge
	#mentat Any /usr/lib/news/sendbatch -O -s80000 mentat
	mutley Any /usr/lib/news/sendbatch -O -b12 -c -s50000 mutley

	As you can see, all we  use it for is news  batching.  I had a problem
with  the =batch patch  suggested in the news source.   I felt it was a little
insecure.  As suggested by Carl, you might give each  of your uucp sites their
own home directory.  The time field is parsed by the same code that parses the
time field in L.sys  so you can put  all the appropriate/necessary  flags that
are available.

	You might note  that there  is an   additional flag to  the  sendbatch
command.  That  is a hack to  sendbatch to make it  batch up only one package.
This solves one of our disk space problems.  We no longer run sendbatch out of
crontab since it is now run  on demand, resulting in at  most  one news packet
sitting around for any one site, in the event that the UUCP conversation fails
or the site fails to call us up for some extended period of time.

	A couple of improvements that I would like to make (but don't have the
time for) would be (1): exec() the command directly, avoiding the problems and
time associated with starting up  a  subshell with   system.  Another thing  I
would  like to  do is  to be able  to pipe the  command  directly into uucico,
rather  than   letting the resultant uux   command  go through the  trouble of
setting up the appropriate control files and spooling the data.

	The only problem I have seen with this setup is when the command takes
an extraordinarily  long to run, the calling  UUCP sometines times  out.  This
usually only happens when the calling  site is REAL  lax about picking up news
and has somewhere on the  order of 6000  articles to  pick up.  Usually  not a
problem, and can be solved by running sendbatch by hand.

	I  would  be  interested in   any   security  holes  that  I  may have
inadvertently opened up.

	If anyone is interested,  please let  me  know and  I will either mail
diffs or post them to the net.


-- 
	Chris Grevstad
	hplabs!sdcrdcf!psivax!nrcvax!chris
	ihnp4!nrcvax!chris

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