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The 640 Meg Shareware Studio CD-ROM Volume II (Data Express)(1993).ISO
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PROBLEMS
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1989-12-31
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Here is a collection of some of the problems people have had with
installation and operation of nn in the past.
RUNNING NN ON 80286
-------------------
The system and machine file for a '286 running Microport UNIX V/AT are
s-uport2-2.h and m-i80286.h, but to get it running you probably have
to do the following things as well:
- tgetstr.o in libcurses is broken in 2.4.
Get an old version (e.g. 1.3) and replaced tgetstr.o.
- Use the m286 malloc posted recently to comp.sources.misc
Thanks to Wietse Z. Venema and Miek Grenier for a lot of work on
locating and fixing 16/32 bit problems in nn which caused it not to
work on the '286.
FILE PERMISSIONS
----------------
You should run as root when installing the package & db, because some
directories might be created in places where ordinary users are not
allowed to write, and secondly because it is not allowed to change the
owner of a file (nnmaster) on some systems.
This might be the cause of your problems.
In general, the permissions and ownership of the various programs
should be set to allow the following access:
- To let the nnmaster READ the news directory (no problem since
/usr/spool/news normally has mode 755),
- To let the nnmaster WRITE in the db-directory and files
- To let ordinary users programs (i.e. nn) READ the db-directory.
For example,
owner group mode
db-directory & files: news news 755
nnmaster: news news 6755 (suid)
nn etc: storm other 755
EXPIRED ARTICLES STILL SHOW UP ON THE MENUS
-------------------------------------------
This common problem is caused by the way the nnmaster "detects" that
expire has been run on a news group: It compares the number of the
first article in the active file with the first article in the data
base. As long as they are identical, nnmaster believes that expire
has not been run.
However, if the first article has an expiration date sometime in the
future it is not removed, although many of the following articles may
very well have been removed.
To overcome this problem, you can instruct the nnmaster to recollect
all groups once a week, or after expire has been run. You do this by
inserting the following command in the crontab to be executed at a
suitable time (with permissions of the owner of nnmaster):
/usr/local/bin/nnadmin I
ABOUT BLOCKED GROUPS
--------------------
A group is blocked while the nnmaster is collecting new articles in
that group. In a newly initialized database, all groups will be
blocked until the nnmaster has collected them the first time, which
may take an hour or so the first time you run nnmaster -r.
This means that there may not be any news to read for a while after
you have just started the nnmaster the first time.
PROBLEMS SENDING MAIL
---------------------
Some people have experienced problems sending mail.
In one case, the recmail program was corrupted.
In another case, uux was not silent causing the trace file (in the aux
script) to be non-empty which fooled nn to think that nothing had been
sent (although it did). If you get failed reply/follow-up messages
look for a line saying something like "uucp job XXXXX" - This is
caused by the environment setting JOBNO=ON.
Also notice that some recmail programs may treat a line consisting of
a single period in the first position as end-of-file.
ACCESSING NEWS REMOTELY
-------------------------
I have received the following problem description which seems to
indicate a network problem. You can now set the variable
retry-on-error
to the number of times nn should try to open an article (you may
want to do this in the global init file!):
We are running on a VAXstation 2000, with the news accessed
remotely, so I get a lot of "can't read" errors. It seems to
me these errors should ALWAYS require acknowledgement before
clearing the message, and should offer the possibility to
re-try the operation (which usually then works for us).
There is a similar option [-y] to nnmaster which can be set to have
the nnmaster perform retries as well.
TERMINAL I-O PROBLEMS
---------------------
nn does not echo the characters you type except when you are entering
a string, e.g. a file name. Instead it attempts to make a significant
change to the data displayed on the screen. On a slow system this may
be seen as a drawback; on fast systems it is an intended feature!
If CBREAK is available, nn will use it, but when CBREAK is not avaiable
nn uses raw mode when reading from the keyboard and cooked mode when
printing on the screen (it flips forth and back). [This behaviour can
be disabled by unsetting the flow-control variable] This has caused
problems on some systems (e.g. the 3B2) where the tty driver is
located on a dedicated IOprocessor, which for some reason handles
ioctl's "out of band". I have tried to work around these problems by
outputting \r\n sequences where \n should have been sufficient.
nn also intentionally discards type-ahead at certain points, but only
if CBREAK mode is not supported, and the flow-control variable is set.
On some systems, TCSETAF also flushes the output queue; you may try to
replace it by TCSETAW followed by TCFLSH.
On terminals where the left arrow key sends a backspace (such as
Wyse50), the backspace key will not properly work as the erase key.
To circumvent this problem on these terminals, place the following
line in your init file:
set erase-key left
Cnews
------
nn wants articles to contain Lines: headers, but Cnews doesn't
generate these in the default setup. You may uncomment the
Lines: code in the inews script.
As distributed, Cnews does not maintain the 'min' value in the active
file - there is a program named `upact' to do this. Without it,
expire on the database will not be performed. One of the Cnews
patches is said to have changed this, but check it out.
NNMASTER WILL NOT START OR IS LOOPING
-------------------------------------
If no nnmaster is running, and nnmaster refuses to start up, you
should check for the existence of the MPID file in the LIB directory,
If it exists, it should be removed.
If nnmaster starts looping, you should check the permissions on the
LIB directory and notice if a GATE file exists which nnmaster is not
allowed to unlink.
NNMASTER DIES WHEN STARTED FROM A TERMINAL
------------------------------------------
The definition DETATCH_TERMINAL in the s- file you use may not work
(it is a no-op on some systems). This will cause a hangup signal to
be sent to the master when you logout, and that will terminate the
master.
WARNINGS DURING COMPILATION
---------------------------
If you get a syntax error when compiling the folder.c file, you
probably have defined HAVE_DIRECTORY in the s- file, but even though
the include file exists, it does not define the DIR type. Either get
hold of a public domain directory package (look in the gnu
distribution), or just undefine HAVE_DIRECTORY which causes nn to use
(much slower) shell commands for file name completion (and disables
the ?-help for file names).
If the linker complains about not finding the function `strcspn'
(whice should be in most standard libraries these days), define the
symbol STRCSPN in the m- file (or config.h) to use the version in
regexp.c.
FORMATTING THE MANUALS
----------------------
Many versions of the -man package may have problems handling the `@'
characters as hanging tags (.TP). Fix your man package by
substituting ALL occurrences of the @ character in tmac.an (or perhaps
tmac.an.new) by a BEL (^G) character.
RESIZING
--------
Resizing only works with termcap (on BSD systems)!
If resizing occurs while reading an article, the article is repositioned
on the first page of the article.
NNMASTER AND NN DOES NOT FIND ANY NEWS
--------------------------------------
All known occurrences of this problem have been identified and fixed.
Be careful about the 'limit' and 'old' variables. Setting them in the
init file may cause nn to behave strangely (as documented :-)
THE DATABASE BECOMES CORRUPTED FOR NO APPARENT REASON
-----------------------------------------------------
This has been seen on some systems in the past.
Three causes for these problems have been identified:
- There was a serious bug in rel. 6.1 which was solved by patch # 5.
Actually, there were no errors in the database, but nn misinterpreted
some information, and reported that the database was corrupted.
- Some .o files had not been recompiled by make after modifying the
config.h file (this happened on SunOS 4.0 which seems to forget to
update file modification times for some files (has anybody seen this
before?)).
- There may still be a bug in the default expire code (when nnmaster
is invoked WITHOUT the -E option) which causes the master to lose
either the first or the last article in the group. Until we have
this problem sorted out (or determined that there isn't a bug), the
use of -E on the nnmaster is recommended.
- nn release 6.3 patch #4 introduced a new 'misinterpretation' of the
database. It is fixed in patch #5.
8 BIT SUPPORT
-------------
I am rather embarrassed to admit that a program leaving Denmark in
1989 does not support 8 bit character sets - however, that is the
plain truth. Currently, all characters typed on the keyboard are
stripped to 7 bits, and only printable characters in the 7 bit ASCII
character set are (normally) displayed on the screen. (You can set
'monitor' to see all the characters in an article).
Anyway, ISO 8859/1 support is next on my agenda.
MAIL RECORDS
------------
There are some things you have to consider in connection with the mail
and news record files:
- When you :mail to yourself, a copy is not saved in the mail-record.
- If the mail/post fails, the message is saved in ~/dead.letter instead
- Since the posting is performed in the background and it may take
upto a minute to complete posting an article, updating news-record
will not happen instantly.
- In previous releases the mail header created by nn in the record
files are not recognized by the digest splitting code in nn, i.e.
the always appear to contain a single article. This is fixed in
release 6.3, but you may have old folders which nn will not be able
to split (there is no From: line).
NNTP PROBLEMS
-------------
A few problems with the current NNTP support are described in the NNTP
file.
OTHER PROBLEMS (you might call them bugs)
-----------------------------------------
The 'master flags' set on a group with nnadmin are forgotten if the
database is reinitialized with nnmaster -I.