The 640 MEG Shareware Studio 2

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Text File | 1989-12-31 | 10.4 KB | 297 lines

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.