Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Still having problems with C News and NNTP
Message-ID: <1989Jul18.170541.18524@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <TALE.89Jul17180751@imagine.pawl.rpi.edu>
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 89 17:05:41 GMT

In article <TALE.89Jul17180751@imagine.pawl.rpi.edu> tale@pawl.rpi.edu writes:
> o doexpire is a real pain.  It bombed out in cron when it kept trying
>to rsh to somewhere.  Why the heck it was rshing anywhere is not
>currently something I understand.

Spacefor, which doexpire invokes, thinks you are not running on the machine
which is your server (i.e. where your news database resides) and is trying
to rsh over there so it can get a dependable answer on how much disk space
you have.  We strongly recommend that the cron stuff should be run on the
server; NFS breaks Unix filesystem semantics so badly in places that in our
opinion it is a mistake to try to pretend that you have shared filesystems.
NFS should be viewed as a superior replacement for FTP, not as a real
network-wide Unix filesystem.

If you *are* running on the server, something is wrong with either your
hostname command or the contents of /usr/lib/news/server, I'd say.

>  o DBZ is there and seems like a performance win.  Documentation on
>how I should compile with it, however, is hard to come by in the
>distribution if it is indeed there at all.

DBZ, like the other stuff in the contrib directory, was included on an
as-is basis and we decline to accept any responsibility for it giving
trouble.  DBZ will probably move to a better part of town :-) sometime
soon, but that has not actually happened yet.

>  o The documentation says that I should be able to run B News and C
>News concurrently until I am sure that C News is working.  This is
>indeed what I would have done but I couldn't find anything to tell me
>how to actually go about doing it.

It isn't especially difficult:  just have rnews/cunbatch feed the incoming
stuff to both news systems, and configure C News so it puts its directories
somewhere other than the places B News uses.  Oh yes, and you'd best make
sure that only one of the two is feeding your neighbors!
-- 
$10 million equals 18 PM       |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
(Pentagon-Minutes). -Tom Neff  | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
