Changi NNTP Server 1.0
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What's New?
Incompatibilities
If you are switching from version 0.9m+n, you should perform
the following steps.
- Send remaining posts to your provider using your old version.
- Make a copy of your current installation.
- Install this version by copying all the files into your Changi directory.
- Run expire -rvxs
to create the new history file format.
- If not done already, set the
NNTPNEIGHBOR environment
variable to the full domain name of your provider's news host.
- Move host.last or
host.watermark files to new
directory before calling Chanx.
- Keep the server running when starting
Chanx or Rnews.
It's a good idea to read the following explanations about
how things have been changed.
Spool file directory
Do not switch to this version unless your spool directory
is empty. Make sure that all your posts have been sent to
your provider, because the new version will now use
subdirectories within the spool directory to specify
different domains.
For example, articles posted to news.ping.de will
now be stored in directory
CHANGISPOOLDIR\ping.de
(that's right, ...\ping.de and not ...\ping\de).
There was a serious bug with version 0.9m+n where, if you
specified a full domain name with NNTPSERVER. Inews created
spool files for this host excluding the domain part, while
Chanx
scanned the spool directory for the full domain name
of your provider's newsserver. Because of this bug
Chanx
couldn't find your posts.
One workaround was to remove the domain part from the
NNTPSERVER (or NNTPNEIGHBOR) environment variable. If
you did that, you should now go back and specify the
full domain name of your provider's newsserver.
History File Format
The date field in history.pag has been
extended by adding
the expiration and posting date. This change has been
carefully implemented and should not break existing
software.
However, the index file has changed significantly and
was therefore renamed from history.dir to history.idx.
Because Changi needs the new index,
you must run
expire -rvxs before starting any other
program of this distribution. After
Expire has successfully created
the new index history.idx, you may delete history.dir.
Programs need running server
All history and active
file processing is now done exclusively
by the Changi Server. Rnews and
Chanx will fail if
Changi isn't running in the background. Other programs, like
Expire,
need an extra command line option to run without it.
Domain directories changed
In previous versions Chanx
created several subdirectories
to store the host.last file. For example, with
a host named
news.this.is.a.domain
Chanx would have created
domain\a\is\this\news.last
This has been changed. For the given host the new version
would create
this.is.a.domain\news.last
Articles mailed to moderators
Changi will no longer accept posts to moderated groups, but will
try to send them to the moderator of that group. You need
to configure sendmail or install any other mail package.
Logging via syslog daemon
Unlike previous versions, no more logfiles are created. All
logging is done by sending messages to a local
syslog server.
I recommend that you install the syslog daemon ported by Jochen
Friedrich, syslog.zip.
Groups not created/deleted automatically
While receiving corresponding control messages, Changi will
not automatically create new or remove existing groups. The
program will now create newgroup.cmd and rmgroup.cmd to be
run later, possibly after you've inspected these files.
Absolute paths needed in environment
Paths given in environment variables are accepted as defined.
Be sure to define absolute paths, use backslashes rather than
slashed and avoid trailing backslashes on directory names.
Changi will no longer try to correct these pathnames, in order
to give complete control to the user.
BATCHER.EXE Removed
BATCHER.EXE has been removed from the package. As far as I know
nobody ever used it and there's a similar program ported by
Jochen Friedrich within his uupcsup package.
INEWS.EXE Removed
INEWS.EXE has been removed too, but could be recreated by
simply copy RNEWS.EXE to INEWS.EXE. Under no circumstances
use previous versions of Inews with this release.
New Features
The new version is much more powerful than any previous one,
with lots of new program options, environment variables and
new configuration files as well. Fortunately, Changi will
work in the expected way without these. It's strictly recommended
that you do not use any additional settings unless you need a
specific behaviour. Experience has shown that many users
became easily confused by defining too many options.
News distribution
While previous versions were limited to sending local posts
to a single remote machine, Changi is now able to distribute
any incoming article to any site you may specify.
Advanced NNTP support
A few common NNTP extensions have been added, like XGTITLE,
XPAT and XROVER. In addition, Changi now supports NNTP
authorization via AUTHINFO on the server as well as on the
client side. Other NNTP functions, like IHAVE, have been refined
for better performance.
Enhanced control using Chanco
Chanco
is now able to control the running server in various
ways. You may
pause or
shutdown the server,
flush files,
add history lines
and change many server options
on the fly.
Specific expiration of old articles
Expire
can apply different expiration times to different
newsgroups in one go.
Experimental Features
Some enhancements have been added in a quick and dirty way for
experimental purposes only. Be careful while trying them.
Character translation
Articles transfered to and from connected newsreaders may
by modified by mapping certain characters. Only subject
lines and article bodies are translated.
Article filtering using REXX
If
Chanx
finds a file named cxdrop.cmd, it will call
this function on each article header it retrieves from
the remote server, supplying each line of the header as a
function argument. The REXX function in cxdrop.cmd
should return 1, if the article should be dropped, 0
otherwise.
Virtual newsgroup local.grep
Articles posted to local.grep are not processed in the usual
way, but will invoke grep to scan for patterns in existing
articles. Matching articles are copied to a subgroup of
local.grep.
Auto newsgroup local.reference
Incoming replies to previous local posts are also
copied to a newsgroup named local.reference.
Last Minute Changes
These changes should be considered even less reliable than the
experimental.
Third Chanx News Retrieval Mode
This new mode can be switched on using command line option -mx
and will force Chanx
to retrieve articles from the remote server
using the XOVER protocol.
Chanx
will also look for a REXX script named overfilt.cmd
and run it as a macro on each overview line. Two arguments are
passed to overfilt.cmd. The first one is the name of the
newsgroup and the second is the overview line itself. If
this macro returns 0,
Chanx will retrieve the corresponding
article. A return value of 1 will drop it. Use option -ld
to store overview lines of dropped articles in host.drop.
Limiting User Access
In addition to nntp_access, Changi
will also check a file named user_access.
To use this function, the newsreader client must support simple AUTHINFO.
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