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Archive-name: usenet/software/b/faq
Version: 1.08 (March 1994)
Last-Modified: Fri Mar 4 17:38:15 EST 1994
This posting provides answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs) encountered
in news.software.b.
A companion posting, "C News Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)"
<software_b_cnews_770454615@nominil.lonesome.com>, provides
information about commonly encountered dilmemmas specifically related to
the C News package. Yet another posting, "News.software.b: Introduction to
news.software.b" <software_b_intro_770454615@nominil.lonesome.com>,
serves as an introduction to the group.
Related postings are maintained by Tom Limoncelli <tal@Warren.MENTORG.COM>:
"INN FAQ Part 1/4: General Information"; "INN FAQ Part 2/4: Debugging Guide
& Tutorial"; "INN FAQ Part 3/4: Operational and Misc. Questions"; and "INN
FAQ Part 4/4: Appendix A: Norman's install guide". Another is maintained
by Rob Robertson <rob@agate.Berkeley.EDU> and entitled "FAQ: Overview
database / NOV General Information."
All these articles are repeated periodically for the benefit of new readers.
(Another set is being drafted by Ian Phillipps <ian@unipalm.co.uk> for
news.admin.technical; at this point this is a "work in progress".)
Subject: Table of contents.
Subject: What is the charter of news.software.b?
Subject: What is considered good net.etiquette on news.software.b?
Subject: What is meant by news transports versus news readers?
Subject: What news transports are available?
Subject: What is the release status of C News? Where can I get it?
Subject: What is the release status of INN? Where can I get it?
Subject: What is the release status of B News? Where can I get it?
Subject: What do I do if I am having trouble with C News?
Subject: What do I do if I am having trouble with INN?
Subject: What do I do if I am having trouble with B News?
Subject: Is there documentation to aid administering news?
Subject: What's the 'junk' newsgroup for? Should I propogate it?
Subject: What is an RFC? Which are the relevant ones?
Subject: Are there advantages of INN over C News?
Subject: Why do C News and INN drop non-conforming articles?
Subject: But why can't the poster be mailed a notice when this happens?
Subject: So how can I find out if sites drop my articles as non-conforming?
Subject: Couldn't we just fix articles by rewriting erroneous headers?
Subject: What do C News and INN do with articles with no Distribution?
Subject: Wouldn't it save space to compress stored news?
Subject: What can I do to prevent running out of inodes in spool?
Subject: Are there any tools for newsgroup moderators?
Subject: Has anyone implemented "private" newsgroups using C News or INN?
Subject: Can the news transport validate cancel messages?
Subject: What is NOV? Where can I get it?
Subject: What are related newsgroups for news transports and readers?
Subject: Is news.software.b archived anywhere?
Subject: Is news.software.b available as a mailing list?
Subject: Why isn't this newsgroup named news.software.transports?
Subject: Contributions to news.software.b FAQ.
Subject: What is the charter of news.software.b?
The charter of news.software.b is to serve as the chief newsgroup for
technical questions about installing, using, and improving the "transport"
layer of the netnews software used on USENET.
Note that the listing in the canonical "newsgroups" file is:
news.software.b Discussion about B-news-compatible software.
Subject: What is considered good net.etiquette on news.software.b?
Here are some etiquette reminders that will help us all to make the group
an ever-friendlier place:
-- Please, before posting, ensure that you've read the basic Usenet
etiquette guide in news.announce.newusers.
-- Please consider the news.software.b readership before you post. Consider
news.admin.misc for general questions about site administration, and
news.software.readers for questions about news-*reading* programs.
-- When following up, please change the Subject: line if the subject has
really changed.
-- Some newsgroups have adopted the practice of using prefixes on Subject:
lines to help readers select articles of interest, e.g.
Subject: C News: How do I rebuild the history file?
Subject: INN: How do I do outbound batching for UUCP?
[In this author's opinion, this is a practice that should be encouraged.]
-- Remember that USENET is a volunteer network. All the code, maintenance,
and question-answering are maintained by folks who freely give their time
to help the net. Please consider this and treat them accordingly. Be
as precise as possible so that overworked knowledgeable people will not
waste time trying to solve the wrong problem.
Subject: What is meant by news transports versus news readers?
The news transport mechanism is the code which receives, process, and
forwards netnews. The news readers (and news posters) allow human users
to interact with the news database built by the transport. The news
transports themselves interact with underlying communications code,
commonly either NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol) or UUCP.
Expiration is typically handled by the transport mechanism.
Subject: What news transports are available?
The following is abstracted from the article "USENET Software: History
and Sources" posted in news.announce.newusers (and cross-posted to
news.software.b) every 4-6 weeks. It is a much more exhaustive survey
of available transports and readers.
The original news software was just called news; once a rewrite called
B News became available, the original version became known as A News.
A News is totally obsolete. B News, although still installed on many
sites across the net, is also obsolete and no longer being maintained.
In fact, the last maintainer now uses INN.
Currently-maintained news software includes, among others, the C News
package and INN (InterNetworkNews package). See below for descriptions
of each of these packages. (The ANU-news package is discussed on
news.software.anu-news, also see below).
Subject: What is the release status of C News? Where can I get it?
Henry Spencer:
The current C News distribution can currently always be retrieved by
anonymous ftp from ftp.cs.toronto.edu in file pub/c-news/c-news.Z (a shell
archive) or pub/c-news/c-news.tar.Z (a tar archive) and the complete set
of patches can also be found on ftp.cs.toronto.edu in the directory
pub/c-news/patches. FTP during our peak hours (12h00-17h00 Eastern) is
not encouraged.
The current C News patch date is 20-Feb-1993. It is referred to as the
"Performance Release."
(It is also available on UUNET as ~/news/cnews/c-news.Z or c-news.tar.Z.
See also the files ~/news/cnews/README and ~/news/cnews/known.problems.
known.problems reports installation problems and bugs that have been
discovered in the current version. It also includes fixes to those problems.)
FAQs)"
<software_b_cnews_770454615@nominil.lonesome.com>, for information
about upcoming releases).
Subject: What is the release status of INN? Where can I get it?
Rich Salz:
The official archive site is ftp.uu.net, networking/news/nntp/inn. Many
other sites have copies, too; ask archie. Look for file inn1.X.tar.Z,
where "1.X" is the revision. Patches and new versions made as needed
and as I have available time. The next revision will be 1.5; no public
date.
[See Tom Limoncelli's FAQs for the latest version and bugfix information.]
Subject: What is the release status of B News? Where can I get it?
B News is no longer either supported or used by its author, and new
installations are strongly discouraged. The last release was patchlevel
19 of version 2.11, of Oct 30, 1989. Note: if your site hasn't even
installed the last version released, you really must give serious and
immediate consideration to upgrading to a package that works according
to modern standards.
Rick Adams:
B news is dead. Don't encourage its use.
Subject: What do I do if I am having trouble with C News?
This is covered in more detail in the companion posting, "C News Frequently
Asked Questions (FAQs)" <software_b_cnews_770454615@nominil.lonesome.com>;
however, your first steps should be as follows: consult the manual pages
and descriptions in doc/trouble. (If you don't have doc/trouble, you
either have an ancient version of C News and should upgrade, or someone
installed a partial distribution). If you can't find an answer there,
see if there is a fix or workaround in the file called "known.problems".
If this still fails to answer your question, try the "Implementor's
Notebook" files in doc/* (start with the README).
Subject: What do I do if I am having trouble with INN?
First, consult the manual pages. There is also an installation guide
(Install.ms) that is very valuable.
See also the two separate FAQ postings in this newsgroup just about INN,
maintained by Tom Limoncelli <tal@Warren.MENTORG.COM>: "INN FAQ Part 1/3:
General Information, how to compile, how to operate"; "INN FAQ Part 2/3:
Tutorial on installing"; and "INN FAQ Part 3/3: Tutorial on debugging and
adding options."
Only if these all fail to answer your questions should you post to
news.software.b.
Subject: What do I do if I am having trouble with B News?
If the documentation you have with it doesn't help you, you had better
ask for help here, because it's no longer being maintained by its author.
However, (especially if you don't even have the last release of B News!),
don't be surprised if the answer is, "can't be done, install C News or INN!"
Subject: Is there documentation to aid administering news?
There is a commercially-published book, "Managing UUCP and USENET", from
O'Reilly and Associates <nuts@ora.com> (+1 800 338 6887 or +1 707 829 0515),
that many readers have recommended. The latest edition of this book
discusses the NNTP protocol and the NNTP implementation maintained by
Stan Barber, commonly known as the "reference implementation" (nntp1.5);
but it does not yet talk about INN. This book has a companion volume,
"Using UUCP and USENET", that is more oriented to users.
A rewrite of these two books is currently being done by Henry Spencer
(the C News portion) and Dave Lawrence (the INN portion). Their book
will become the volume on both using and managing USENET news; the
tentative release date is set for late 1994. (Note: bugging either of
these busy folks won't get it done faster :-) ) [O'Reilly may rearrange
the other material into a companion volume that would cover both using
and managing UUCP; plans are less definitely.]
For the impatient, you can subscribe to the O'Reilly announcements list
by sending a message to listproc@online.ora.com with the first line:
subscribe ora-news Your Name at Your Organization
The Subject: line will be ignored.
Subject: What's the 'junk' newsgroup for? Should I propogate it?
The junk newsgroup contains all the postings which the news transport
can't file under a newsgroup name. These can include malformed postings
(either as result of human, software, or transmission error); postings to
bogus groups; postings to groups that have been deleted; postings to new
groups that you haven't added yet; and postings to groups that you don't
carry at your site, and don't intend to.
Some admins see it as friendly to transmit junk to your neighbors, to cover
the latter two cases. However, common practice is to expire junk almost
immediately afterwards.
If you're getting lots of postings in junk, it may mean that the combination
of your sys file, your active file, and your neighbors' sys files, are not
doing what you intend them to.
Subject: What is an RFC? Which are the relevant ones?
An RFC (Request For Comment) is a formal mechanism used to describe communi-
cations standards for the Internet and systems (like USENET) that are closely
tied to it. The relevant RFCs for news include:
1123 Requirements for Internet hosts - application and support. Braden, R.T.,
ed. 1989 October; 98 p. (Format: TXT=245503 bytes) (Updated by RFC
1349)
(A small part of this long RFC is relevant to news: it amends RFC 822 so
that, in dates, a 4-digit year is no longer prohibited, but is preferred;
and that numeric time zone names are suggested).
1036 Horton, M.R.; Adams, R. Standard for interchange of USENET messages.
1987 December; 19 p. (Format: TXT=46891 bytes) (Obsoletes RFC 850)
(This is the most relevant of this set, to this newsgroup. Note: an effort
is currently underway to revise and update RFC 1036 to better reflect modern
practice. A *long* (53pp.) draft proposal of this "Son-of-RFC-1036" is
available for anonymous ftp from zoo.toronto.edu in file pub/news.txt.Z. As
above, FTP during their peak hours (12h00-17h00 Eastern) is not encouraged.)
977 Kantor, B.; Lapsley, P. Network News Transfer Protocol. 1986
February; 27 p. (Format: TXT=55062 bytes)
976 Horton, M.R. UUCP mail interchange format standard. 1986 February;
12 p. (Format: TXT=26814 bytes)
822 Crocker, D. Standard for the format of ARPA Internet text messages.
1982 August 13; 47 p. (Format: TXT=109200 bytes) (Obsoletes RFC 733)
Online copies of RFCs are available via FTP or Kermit from NIC.DDN.MIL as
rfc:rfc####.txt or rfc:rfc####.ps (#### is the RFC number without leading
zeroes).
Additionally, RFCs may be requested through electronic mail from the
with a subject line of "RFC ####" for text versions or a subject line
of "RFC ####.PS" for PostScript versions. To obtain the RFC index,
the subject line of your message should read "RFC index".
Subject: Are there advantages of INN over C News?
It depends on whose religion you believe in more strongly :-)
Rich Salz:
They are targeted for different environments, although both systems seem
to work fairly well outside of their targets.
INN is designed for hosts on the Internet with a fair amount of memory and
multiple fast incoming NNTP feeds. It's a full USENET system, but most
traffic is NNTP. (E.g., rnews unpacks a batch and sends it to the server
via NNTP.) If you do NNTP, you'll find it easier to maintain the one
single system, rather than two. Also, posting is synchronous -- when
inews returns, the article has been written to disk and queued for
forwarding. [By comparison, C News is asynchronous -- Mark.] INN puts
a low, constant, load on your machine.
Several people run INN on UUCP-only machines.
David Myers:
Whether or not you use NNTP may influence your decision. If you wish to
use NNTP internally, then with C News you have to also install the standard
NNTP package. [Don't confuse this package, named "nntp", with the NNTP
protocol itself! It's just one implementation -- Mark.] This may or may
N, you get
it all in one package.
Geoff Collyer:
This should cease to be an issue once we ship the Cleanup Release, which
will contain an NNTP implementation.
Subject: Why do C News and INN drop non-conforming articles?
Henry Spencer:
Dropping of nonconforming articles is partly a necessity, since some
classes of nonconformance can cause major screwups in other news systems.
(Almost all the tightening of checking has been due to pressure from
others, not [Geoff's and my] own inclinations.) In any case, (a) we hope
this is a [transient] thing that will become insignificant when people
clean up their act, and (b) you can (in principle) determine whether this
will happen to an article by a simple and objective standard. Dropping
articles due to local configuration errors is much more insidious; one
thing that is very clear from our experience so far is that news software
*must not* assume competent and conscientious sysadmins.
Subject: But why can't the poster be mailed a notice when this happens?
Mark Brader:
This would be desirable if the poster could be notified just once, or
a small number of times, but there is no way to enforce this. An article
may enter the network through a chain of sites, each feeding just one
other, or it may immediately reach a site that feeds it to a large number
of others, and there's no way to tell what software the other sites that
processed it were using. Thus, there'd be no way to tell whether an
earlier site on the path, or 200 other sites served by the same feed,
had already mailed such a diagnostic.
Subject: So how can I find out if sites drop my articles as non-conforming?
Several major sites post summaries of articles dropped at their site as
non-conforming, usually including article Message-ID:s and the reason for
non-conformance.
These include:
Newsgroups: news.lists,news.admin.misc
From: rsalz@rodan.UU.NET (Rich Salz)
Subject: Articles rejected at news.uu.net during the past week
Organization: UUNET Communications
The articles listed below were rejected by InterNetNews at
news.uu.net during the past week because they do not conform to
standard interpretation of Internet RFCs 822 and 1036. [...]
news.uu.net is also configured to reject articles that are more
than 14 days old.
[Reasons for rejecting include: duplicate header; no article body;
illegal header (e.g., not in word-colon-space format); unapproved
article posted to a moderated group; whitespace in "Newsgroups"
header; required header missing; posting with "Distribution: local";
bad "Date" header; "Date" header in future (when received); invalid
Message-ID.
Newsgroups: news.admin.misc
From: kherron@ms.uky.edu (Kenneth Herron)
Subject: Non-compliant articles, week ending DD Month YY
The following is a list of articles which were dropped by the
news software here for a non-compliant header. [Reasons: header
contains non-header line; unapproved article in moderated group;
message ID not bracketed with <>; no Subject or empty Subject;
no From: header; no Date or unparsable Date; date in future (when
received).
Subject: Couldn't we just fix articles by rewriting erroneous headers?
Henry Spencer:
We [Geoff and I] are vehemently, nay violently, opposed to ever rewriting
headers in any circumstances whatsoever. It's soooo easy to do more harm
than good. We also don't think it's that big a favor to people to help-
fully fix up their misposted articles without any feedback to them.
[FAQ author's note: I would be interested in collaborating with anyone who
has done some work on this problem at the article-injection point. -- Mark]
Subject: What do C News and INN do with articles with no Distribution?
Henry Spencer:
C News treats no distribution as completely equivalent to
"Distribution: world", and this *is* documented.
Rich Salz:
For all intents and purposes, INN treats treats articles without a
Distribution header the same way C News does. If the article has no
such header, then distribution is NOT limited, so the article should
go everywhere by default.
Subject: Wouldn't it save space to compress stored news?
Henry Spencer:
There are three fundamental problems that have always pretty much scuttled
proposals for article compression.
One is that it saves space at the expense of CPU time, and CPU time is
not always in ample supply on news hosts.
A much more serious problem is: how *much* space does it save? Bear in
mind that news articles are small -- they consistently average about
3KB -- and small files do not compress particularly well. Worse, the
quantum of disk storage on many systems is quite large. If you compress
the typical article from 3K-1 bytes to 2K+1 bytes, most modern systems
will see *no storage savings at all*, because they allocate disk in
1KB blocks.
The final problem is that an improvement by a factor of (say) 1.5 does
not buy you a lot of time in the news business. In exchange for a lot
of work and a permanently raised CPU load, you set the growth curve
back a few months.
Geoff Collyer:
A more general solution than hacking all the news software, that also
benefits ftp archives and the like, is to write a user-mode (NFS) file
server for /usr/spool/news (and /usr/spool/ftp, etc.) that compresses
files as they are written (after the close for non-sequential writes) and
decompresses files when they are read (the entire file will have to be
uncompressed temporarily into scratch space for non-sequential reads).
Such a server provides compression transparently and is in a good
position to decide that very small files should not be compressed because
there is little or no benefit to doing so. Keeping the server in user
mode avoids the horror of embedding compress in kernel code.
Subject: What can I do to prevent running out of inodes in spool?
When you lay out your spool file system (the one that holds the actual
articles) with newfs, you'll need to change its defaults to account for
the different ratio of typical file size/number of inodes typically
found on news spool disks.
Articles typically run about 3000 bytes per inode. The default for a
UFS (BSD fast) file system is 2K bytes/inode which should be sufficient.
But "mkfs" will silently limit the number of inodes in a cylinder group
so some disk formats wind up with too few inodes. Using smaller cylinder
groups is a solution to this problem. The following is a typical command
for creating a new spool/news file system:
newfs -c 8 -f 512 -b 4096 diskname
Using a cylinder group size of 8 allows up to double the number of inodes
that the default group size of 16 permits. Note that using 512 byte
fragments will allow about 20% more articles than the default 1K due to
the small size of the average article. In any case verify the bytes/inode
is below 3K before using the file system!
Old style Unix file sytems are limited the 65K inodes total. The
only work around is to create several smaller partitions such that
each file system has <= 3Kbytes/inode. Then split the news groups
into the various file system to equalize usage as evenly as possible.
Subject: Are there any tools for newsgroup moderators?
Kent Landfield <kent@sparky.sterling.com> maintains an archive of
moderator-contributed tools on sparky.sterling.com under /moderators.
What follows is an extract of the Index file for that archive:
This directory contains tools written and used by moderators of USENET
newsgroups.
The contents of this archive have been generously made available in an "AS
IS" condition. Many of the sources, scripts and yes, documents are not as
pretty as the individual moderators may like but they work and are being
used. The idea is that the archive is a snapshot of tools used. They are
done and potentially get a
copy as a starting point for their newsgroup's required modifications.
The following is a listing of the current contents of the archive. I have
currently unbundled the individual archives. The permissions of the unbundled
files have been modified.
[In the index, the list of files follows -- Mark].
Subject: Has anyone implemented "private" newsgroups using C News or INN?
David Beckemeyer:
What I want by saying a "private" newsgroup is a local newsgroup that
is only viewable by certain users, probably based on GID. I suppose
this means that relaynews would have to use a different umask and group
ownership on articles in these groups.
Tom Limoncelli:
cd /var/spool/news/secret/newsgroup
chown news .
chgrp membersonly .
chmod o= .
That's all you have to do. Same story for INN users.
Subject: Can the news transport validate cancel messages?
Henry Spencer:
Nothing short of cryptographic authentication is a real solution, and
even there, there are some tricky problems. There are times when you
*want* someone other than the author to be able to cancel an article,
e.g. when the article was posted maliciously and real problems can be
averted by getting rid of it. In cases of things like copyright
violation, it is very important that cancel work.
Subject: What is NOV? Where can I get it?
Geoff Collyer:
The news overview (nov) database is a textual database of some news
article headers, and is intended to replace the voluminous binary
databases (with associated byte-order swapping hassles) maintained by
newsreaders such as nn and trn, one database per newsreader. The nov
database and the reference access library are extensible, and the
database is sharable by multiple newsreaders and relatively cheap to
maintain. The reference access library will perform on-the-fly threading,
which is cheap enough to make storing thread links on disk pointless.
I have done no work on making nov databases accessible via NNTP, since I
think NNTP is the wrong way to read news, but others have. I cannot act
as a central clearinghouse for information on nov over NNTP; sorry.
Here's world.std.com:src/news/README.nov:
If you've come here looking for the news overview database software (nov),
pick up *.dist.tar.Z, which includes the nov library and support software
and nov-ised proof-of-concept versions of vnews, nn and trn. These
versions of the newsreaders aren't guaranteed to get all the details
right; you'll have to wait for official releases incorporating nov
support from the various reader maintainers for that.
Previously, the "P" command in nov-ised nn didn't go back a group and
nov-ised nn wanted to read a MASTER or GROUP file rather than active.
Wolfgang Rupprecht sent me patches that appear to fix these defects and I
have incorporated them into the nov-ised nn distribution.
[Note: this subject is now more extensively coverd in the posting maintained
by Rob Robertson <rob@agate.Berkeley.EDU> entitled "FAQ: Overview database
/ NOV General Information." -- Mark]
Subject: What are related newsgroups for news transports and readers?
Other news transports:
news.software.anu-news VMS B-news software from Australian National Univ.
Lower-level communication code:
news.software.nntp The Network News Transfer Protocol.
(This is an INET group, so not everyone has it.)
comp.mail.uucp Mail in the uucp network environment.
News readers:
news.software.readers Discussion of software used to read network news.
(Used when no reader-specific group is available.)
news.software.nn Discussion about the "nn" news reader package.
news.software.notes Notesfile software from the Univ. of Illinois.
(Some consider this to be obsolete for Usenet use.)
Subject: Is news.software.b archived anywhere?
Not that I'm aware of.
Subject: Is news.software.b available as a mailing list?
Not that I'm aware of.
Subject: Why isn't this newsgroup named news.software.transports?
Historically, the group acquired its name when the B News transport
software predominated. Since C News was introduced, no one has ever
managed to forge a consensus as to whether a better name would be
news.software.transport (which might be a more generally descriptive
name) or news.software.transport_s_ (which would dovetail better with
news.software.readers).
At some point, some brave soul will probably pick either one, post an RFD
(Request for Discussion) to rename it and alias the old name, and voila!
However, Mark Brader offered the following curmudgeonly rebuttal:
I don't think that's really it. I think it's more a case of leaving
well enough alone.
Subject: Contributions to news.software.b FAQ.
Thanks to the following for contributions, additions, corrections, and updates:
Rick Adams <rick@uunet.uu.net>
Jerry Aguirre <jerry@strobe.ATC.Olivetti.Com>
David Beckemeyer <david@bdt.com>
Mark Brader <msb@sq.com>
Geoff Collyer <geoff@world.std.com>
Christopher Davis <ckd@kei.com>
Paul Eggert <eggert@twinsun.com>
Marc G Fournier <marc@r-node.hub.org>
Kenneth Herron <kherron@ms.uky.edu>
Kent Landfield <kent@sparky.sterling.com>
David Lawrence <tale@uunet.UU.NET>
Tom Limoncelli <tal@warren.mentorg.com>
David Myers <dem@meaddata.com>
Ian Phillipps <ian@unipalm.co.uk>
Rich Salz <rsalz@rodan.UU.NET>
Henry Spencer <henry@zoo.toronto.edu>
This posting, like much of Usenet, is maintained on a purely volunteer
basis. I welcome reactions, additions, and corrections via email at
linimon@nominil.lonesome.com.
--
Mark Linimon / Lonesome Dove Computing Services / linimon@lonesome.com
"He pulled out his fiddle and he rosined up his bow,
and he played a little tune called the New Cut Road."
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