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.
  1. Send remaining posts to your provider using your old version.
  2. Make a copy of your current installation.
  3. Install this version by copying all the files into your Changi directory.
  4. Run expire -rvxs to create the new history file format.
  5. If not done already, set the NNTPNEIGHBOR environment variable to the full domain name of your provider's news host.
  6. Move host.last or host.watermark files to new directory before calling Chanx.
  7. 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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URL: changi/manual/whatsnew.html
Created: 6 August 1996
Revised: 21 November 1996
Author: harald@os2point.ping.de