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: <#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:.DNewsRC, where 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/ 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