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From: tar@sirius.cis.ksu.edu (Tim Ramsey)
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
Subject: Cnews and nntp 1.5.7 gotchas under SysV
Message-ID: <1989Dec23.035953.21905@deimos.cis.ksu.edu>
Date: 23 Dec 89 03:59:53 GMT
Sender: news@deimos.cis.ksu.edu (USENET News Admin)
Reply-To: tar@ksuvax1.cis.ksu.edu (Tim Ramsey)
Organization: Kansas State University, Dept of Computing & Information Sciences
Lines: 46

Hi all.  Recently, I changed my news transport from B 2.11.17 / nntp 1.5.3
to C news (14-Sep-1989) / nntp 1.5.7.  My OS is sysV 2.1.2, and I've #defined
DBM, CNEWS, and BATCHED_INPUT in ./nntp/common/conf.h.  I ran into some
gotchas, most of which I managed to get around.  I'm curious if others with
similar setups have had the same problems, and if so, how they handled them.

First, ./nntp/server/spawn.c assumes that the spawnee is execl'able.  If the
spawnee is a shell script and your kernel doesn't understand the "#!" magic
number, this isn't true.  I found this when I tried to post an article and
the NNTP server attempted to spawn inews.  With B news, this works since
inews is object code.  With C news, it's a shell script.

My fix was to check if errno == ENOEXEC (exec format error).  If so, I spawn
/bin/sh with argv[1] set to the pathname of the spawnee.  I had to make this
change in batch.c since newsrun is a shell script too.

Unfortunately, this fix caused the fake inews to block for a long time
waiting for the server to respond to the POST command.  The server seemed
to be blocked waiting for input from the spawned process.  I was too frazzled
from the fight with C news to track this down, so I just ifdef'd out the code
that reads stdout from the spawned process.  As a result, posting no longer
causes the fake inews to block, but the user does not get to see any errors
returned by inews on the server.

Second, Cnews allows a "x" or "=news.group" in the active file.  I attempted
to use the "x" flag to block some unwanted groups (like alt.sex.bestiality).
When I started up rn, it asked me if I wanted to add the new group
"alt.sex.bestiality" to my .newsrc.  This is not what I had intended.

I haven't gotten around to fixing this yet.  When I do, I'll probably have
to hunt around the server code for things that deal with the active file
and make them ignore lines that have the "x" or "=" flags (if CNEWS is
#defined).

Has anyone else run into these problems?  Are there patches that I've
missed that deal with them?  Any wisdom?

Thanks,

Tim

--
"Desperately trying..." -- Edie    Dept. of Computing and Information Sciences
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