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From: usenet@delrio.cc.umich.edu (Usenet News)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: rn, nntp, news on Apollos
Message-ID: <389343e3.c6e5@delrio.cc.umich.edu>
Date: Thu, 19-Nov-87 15:51:05 EST
Article-I.D.: delrio.389343e3.c6e5
Posted: Thu Nov 19 15:51:05 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 22-Nov-87 08:28:27 EST
References: <2528@super.upenn.edu>
Reply-To: hyc@umix.cc.umich.edu (Howard Chu)
Distribution: na
Organization: University of Michigan Computing Center, Ann Arbor
Lines: 39
Keywords: rn, nntp, news
UUCP-Path: {uunet,rutgers}!umix!hyc


In article <2528@super.upenn.edu> adam@apollo.lap.upenn.edu (Adam Feigin) writes:
>Howdy Folks !
>
>I just got the sources to rn & nntp, and am going to attempt
>to get them running on my Apollo. Basically, I only need to get
>the 'client' running, as the server runs on the main campus
>machine which spools news all over the place.
>

NNTP runs just fine on Apollos; I have used both the client and the
server code on our ring here at the Computing Center. Depending on
where you got your source code from though, you may have some fun
merging the NNTP mods with rn. I hear there's now a patchlevel 39
copy of rn with NNTP patches preapplied available. (From ucbvax.berkeley...)
I wound up applying the NNTP stuff to my copy of rn mostly by hand,
since the original NNTP patches were for rn of patchlevel 27, and a
lot of the diffs didn't match any more. In any case, it was a do-able
process.

Rn is also pretty easy to get running, but you have to watch out for
one thing in the Configure script before you can get going - it tries
to tell whether you're a Berkeley or Sys V site by looking for tell-tale
names like index() or strchr() in your C library. Of course, it tries
to do this by invoking ar on /lib/libc.a, which doesn't exist on the
Apollos. I changed our Configure script such that when this process
fails, it extracts symbol names by using nm on /lib/clib. This turns
out to be all that's necessary to get Configure to run, and after that,
you should be able to build a working rn with no problems.

Also, the beta-version of TCP that we have on these Apollos occasionally
injects garbage into a TCP stream, so, while using NNTP to transfer news
is usually a painless process, we do get occasional transmission failures.
I've been modifying the nntpxmit/nntpsend stuff to lessen their impact
though, and it works very well overall.

I've been doing quite a bit with Usenet news on these Apollos, as well
as our Vax & Suns. Feel free to email me if you've got other questions.
  -- Howard Chu
	University of Michigan Computing Center, Unix Project