string and the output of uuname, respectively. C (Php web hosting)
string and the output of uuname, respectively. C News is very laconic about version messages; it returns a simple, unadorned C. Again, you should never issue such a message unless you have made sure that it cannot leave your (regional) network. Replies to sendsys messages can quickly bring down a UUCP network.131 C News in an NFS Environment A simple way to distribute news within a local network is to keep all news on a central host and export the relevant directories via NFS so that newsreaders may scan the articles directly. The overhead involved in retrieving and threading articles is significantly lower than NNTP. NNTP, on the other hand, wins in a heterogeneous network where equipment varies widely among hosts, or where users don’t have equivalent accounts on the server machine. When you use NFS, articles posted on a local host have to be forwarded to the central machine because accessing adminstrative files might otherwise expose the system to race conditions that leave the files inconsistent. Also, you might want to protect your news spool area by exporting it read-only, which also requires forwarding to the central machine. C News handles this central machine configuration transparently to the user. When you post an article, your newsreader usually invokes inews to inject the article into the news system. This command runs a number of checks on the article, completes the header, and checks the file server in /etc/news. If this file exists and contains a hostname different from the local host’s name, inews is invoked on that server host via rsh. Since the inews script uses a number of binary commands and support files from C News, you have to either have C News installed locally or mount the news software from the server. For the rsh invocation to work properly, each user who posts news must have an equivalent account on the server system, i.e., one to which she can log in without being asked for a password. Make sure that the hostname given in server literally matches the output of the hostname command on the server machine, or else C News will loop forever in an attempt to deliver the article. We discuss NFS is detail in Chapter 14, The Network File System. Maintenance Tools and Tasks Despite the complexity of C News, a news administrator’s life can be fairly easy; C News provides you with a wide variety of maintenance tools. Some of these are intended to be run regularly from cron, like newsdaily. Using these scripts greatly reduces daily care and feeding requirements of your C News installation. Unless stated otherwise, these commands are located in /usr/lib/news/maint. (Note that you must become user news before invoking these commands. Running them as a superuser may render critical newsfiles inaccessible to C News.): newsdaily The name already says it: run this once a day. It is an important script that helps you keep log files small, retaining copies of each from the last three runs. It also tries to sense anomalies, like stale batches in the incoming and outgoing directories, postings to unknown or moderated newsgroups, etc. Resulting error messages are mailed to the newsmaster. newswatch This script should be run regularly to look for anomalies in the news system, once an hour or so. It is intended to detect problems that will have an immediate effect on the operability of your news system, in which case it mails a trouble report to the newsmaster. Things checked include stale lock files that don’t get removed, unattended input batches, and disk space shortage. I wouldn’t try this on the Internet, either.