Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
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From: roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith)
Subject: Problem with nntp/C-news/nfs interactions
Message-ID: <1990Jul11.164853.1715@phri.nyu.edu>
Sender: news@phri.nyu.edu (News System)
Organization: Public Health Research Institute, New York City
Date: Wed, 11 Jul 90 16:48:53 GMT

	We run nntp 1.5.7 and C-news (most recent patch, 14-Sep-1989) on a
Vax-11/750 running MtXinu 4.3BSD/NFS.  As a temporary measure to gain some
space after being off the net for a week and getting flooded with news when
we got reconnected, I recently mounted /usr/spool/news/in.coming remotely.
What I actually did was to make a temporary file system on wombat (a
Sun-3/180 running SunOS-3.5.2) called /news and mount wombat:/news as
/usr/spool/news/temp, mv in.coming/* to temp, and make a symlink from
in.coming to temp.  Got that? :-)

	All the 40 or so Mbytes of spooled news waiting in in.coming
eventually got processed.  But, when new news would come in via nntp, it
would just fall into a black hole.  The occasional article we still get via
uucp would get processed without any trouble.  I could see the nntp traffic
on the ethernet using tcpdump or netscope, and could see nntpd running on
the vax when I did ps, but no files would show up in in.coming, no entries
would be made in any of the news or nntp log files or the errlog files.

	Eventually I figured out that what was going on was that nntpd was
running as root and root permissions do not extend accross NFS mount
points.  One question this brings up is, does nntp really have to run as
root?  Could I run nntp as news instead?  Another is, why didn't nntp log
any error messages anywhere?  /usr/lib/news/nntperrlog would be the obvious
place, but there isn't anything there about getting write failures.  There
are some other error messages in nntperrlog about some random badness in my
history file, so I know nntpd was able to write onto nntperrlog.
--
Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy
"Arcane?  Did you say arcane?  It wouldn't be Unix if it wasn't arcane!"
