
				   NEWS

    The NEWS system consists of many programs:

    (1) rnews

	RNews is run by UUXQT which is run by UUCICO after a transfer.
	RNews takes incomming news (which is normally batched) and breaks
	it up into articles, placing each article in the appropriate
	newsgroup in UUNEWS:  The sequence number of the article is tracked
	with a file called .next that exists in each news directory.

	RNews is also called by PostNews to post articles you send out
	locally as well as queue them, via the UULIB:Sys file, to other
	systems (see BATCHNEWS)

    (2) trimnews

	TrimNews is normally run nightly by a DCron entry and deletes all
	news files over N days old.  The number of days is programmable for
	each newsgroup from the UULIB:NewsGroups file.	Each line in this
	file is of the form:

	    <newsgroup> <#days-till-expiration>

	example:

	    comp.sys.amiga.tech 15

	Where the second field is optional.  If the second field does not exist
	it is assumed to be 7 (7 days).  If the second field is 0 then that
	particular group will not be trimmed.

	If you are receiving news this is pretty much a neccessity to prevent
	news files from building up and filling the disk.

	NOT RUNNING TRIMNEWS MEANS THAT ARTICLES WILL CONTINUE TO PILE UP
	UNTIL THE DISK IS FULL!

    (3) DNews

	DNews is the new news reader, ANews is the old.  ANews is being phased
	out.

	DNews may be used to read and reply to news.  DNews keeps track of
	the articles you have read in a file called UULIB:<user>.DNewsRC,
	where <user> is the UserName config entry.  The USERNAME enviroment
	variable overides the config entry allowing multiple news readers
	to have their own DNewsRc file.

	DNews does not delete or modify any news file, allowing news routing
	in a future UUCP release as well as multi-user support.

    (4) BatchNews

	BatchNews takes articles queued to other systems via the UULIB:Sys
	file and batches them together into actual spool files.  Each system
	in UULIB:Sys has a file called UUSPOOL:BATCH/<system_name> which
	lists articles bound for that system.  This file is appended to by
	RNews when it receives news.

    (5) CBatch

	CBatch is called by BatchNews to compress an article


				RECEIVING NEWS

    To receive news you must contact a site that receives news and ask them
    to send you news.  Sites normally handle this in one of two ways:

	(1) Lazy sites will want to send you ALL the newsgroups (about 2MBytes
	    a day) or not send you news at all.

	(2) Properly managed sites will be able to batch up specific groups
	    for you.  This is preferable, since you will most likely only
	    want to read a couple of groups.

    The setup on your end consists of editing the UULIB:NewsGroups file to
    list all the groups you want to extract out of the stream.	Henceforth,
    any news sent to you by the other system will automatically be
    unbatched and available to DNews.  Here is an example of this file:

    -------------- cut here -----------
    comp.sys.amiga	7
    comp.sys.amiga.tech 7
    news.admin		7
    rec.games.frp	7
    news.misc		7
    junk		1
    -------------- cut here -----------

    Each line consists of two fields.  The first is the name of the
    newsgroup.	The second field specifies the number of days a
    particular message should be kept on your system before it expires.

    The TRIMNEWS program scans all newsfiles looking for files older
    than the specified number of days and deletes them.  TRIMNEWS should
    be run from your cron once per day.  If you do not run TRIMNEWS,
    news files will build up over the weeks until you run out of disk
    space.

    Note that there is a 'junk' group specification in UULIB:NewsGroups.
    This is a dummy group to which all messages to unlisted groups are
    placed.  Generally you will want to expire this group on a per day
    basis rather than a weekly (or whatever you choose) basis.  However,
    if you are forwarding news to other sites you will want the timeout
    to be the same as for other groups.  See FORWARDING NEWS below.

				POSTING NEWS

    You can post news from DNews.  In order for the posted news to be
    properly queued to your news feed you must have an entry in UULIB:Sys
    that looks like this (assume 'foo' is your news feed):

	foo:*

    When you post from DNews the article is posted locally and the UULIB:Sys
    file specifies to RNews which other machines should receive the news.

    Finally, before you run UUCico you must run the BATCHNEWS program to
    pull the individual article lists destined for machines and actually
    create batch files for them in UUSPOOL:  Normally, BatchNews is run
    by DCron just before UUCico gets run by DCron.

    IF YOU DO NOT PROPOGATE NEWS TO OTHER SITES, and basically would
    otherwise run 'BatchNews' manually every time you post an article,
    you can have AmigaUUCP automatically run BatchNews for you on a
    per-posting basis.	To do this add the following Config entry
    to UULIB:Config:

	AutoBatch   autobatch

    This will cause BatchNews to be run automatically whenever you post
    news.

				FORWARDING NEWS

    Please read the manual page 'Sys' and 'BatchNews'... basically, you can
    pass news to other sites by specifying them in the Sys file.

    If your machine has a lot of traffic comming from other sites (say you
    host a local Amiga Users Group USENET sub network) you may want to run
    BatchNews several times a day... maybe even once an hour depending on
    how often you expect to get called or call other sites.  Remember that
    NEWS QUEUED TO OTHER MACHINES DOES NOT ACTUALLY GET SPOOLED FOR TRANSFER
    UNTIL BATCHNEWS IS RUN

    The system works by storing references to articles in the directory
    UUSPOOL:BATCH/ ... you must create this directory if you intend to
    forward news.  When BATCHNEWS is run, this directory is scan and the
    referenced news articles are pulled from the appropriate directory in
    UUNEWS:, compressed, and batched together for transmission.  A given
    news article will never be batched to a site that it has already been
    to, by virtual of a comparison made between each prospective news
    site and elements in the news Path: header for a given article.

    Note that you can propogate any subset of the groups you receive,
    whether or not they are listed in UULIB:NewsGroups .. this is because
    any groups not listed in UULIB:NewsGroups will be placed in the
    UUNEWS:JUNK directory.  THESE ARTICLES ARE STILL CANDIDATES FOR
    NEWS BATCHING, HOWEVER, ALLOWING YOUR PERSONAL GROUP PREFERENCESE TO
    NOT INTERFERE WITH YOUR PROPOGATION OF GROUPS TO OTHER SITES.

    Refer to the MAN/DNews manual page for specific information on DNews


