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Tools and Tasks
Despite the complexity of C-News, a news administrator's life
can be fairly easy, because 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 reduces
daily care and feeding requirements of your C-News installation greatly.
Unless stated otherwise, these commands are located in
/usr/lib/news/bin/maint. Note that you must become user news
before invoking these commands. Running them as super-user may render
these files inaccessible to C-News.
- newsdaily
- The name already says it: runs this once a day. It is an
important script that helps you keep log files small, retain-
ing copies of each from the last three runs. It also tries to
sense any anomalies, like stale batches in the incoming and
outgoing directories, postings to unknown or moderated news-
groups, etc. Resulting error messages will be mailed to the
newsmaster.
- newswatch
- This is a script that 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 immediate effect on
the operability of your news system and mail a trouble report
to the newsmaster. Things checked include stale lock files
that don't get removed, unattended input batches, and disk
space shortage.
- addgroup
- Adds a group to your site locally. The proper invocation is
addgroup groupname y|n|m|=realgroup
The second argument has the same meaning as the flag in
the active file, meaning that anyone may post to the group
(y), that no-one may post (n), that it is moderated (m), or
that it is an alias for another group (=realgroup).
You might also want to use addgroup when the first arti-
cles in a newly created group arrive earlier than the newgroup
control message that is intended to create it.
- delgroup
- Allows you to delete a group locally. Invoke it as
delgroup groupname
You still have to delete the articles that remain in the
newsgroup's spool directory. Alternatively, you might leave it
to the natural course of events (a.k.a. expire) to make them
go away.
- addmissing
- Adds missing articles to the history file. Run this script
when there are articles that seem to hang around forever.(11)
- newsboot
- This script should be run at system boot time. It removes any lock files left over when news processes were killed at shut-
down, and closes and executes any batches left over from NNTP
connections that were terminated when shutting down the sys-
tem.
- newsrunning
- This resides in /usr/lib/news/bin/input, and may be used to disable un-batching of incoming news, for instance during work
hours. You may turn off un-batching by invoking
/usr/lib/news/bin/input/newsrunning off
Andrew Anderson
Thu Mar 7 23:22:06 EST 1996
