Afloyd.206
net.news
utzoo!decvax!harpo!floyd!trb
Fri May 7 15:27:28 1982
netnews acting flakey?
I had a pre-release version of netnews (pre-2.6). It came with
NEWSUSR = daemon and NEWSGRP = sys. 2.6 came with both of those vars
set to "news." Therefore, if you installed 2.6 netnews over some older
version, 2.6 might not be able to write into your "active" file because
of bad uids. If you are the "usenet" user, you should be getting
control messages now and then informing you about new groups. If this
doesn't happen, then something is wrong. Check (at least) to make sure
that your "active" file is getting properly written. Mine wasn't, and
I've heard confused mutterings from other folks indicating that they
were having similar problems (one fellow here said that in order to
read new news he'd have to cd to /usr/spool/news and cat it, that
sounds like a bad "active" file to me...)
One telling thing to do is make a new active file. You can do this by
ls'ing /usr/spool/news and then filling in the tails of names
(net.unix-wizar should be edited to be net.unix-wizards.) If you have
"all" in your subscription list (and you !subscribe to groups that bore
you) and you run readnews with this new active file, and you see messages
for groups you never knew existed, then you are the victim of a bad
active file. Make sure netnews can read and write it.
Andy Tannenbaum Bell Labs Whippany, NJ (201) 386-6491
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