The Fred Fish Collection 1.5/ffcollection-1-5-1992-11.iso/ff_disks/300-399/ff319.lzh/CNewsSrc/cnews.orig.lzh/doc/install

Text File | 1989-06-27 | 14KB | 495 lines

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Installing ``C News'' Network News Software
.AU
Geoff Collyer
.AI
Department of Statistics
University of Toronto
.AB
This document describes the flow
of network news within and between machines,
what each component of C news does,
and
how to install C news.
.AE
.SH
Introduction
.PP
Network news
(or
.I netnews
for short)
consists of a collection of messages formatted similarly to
ARPAnet mail
(see ARPA Internet RFC 1036 for details),
widely spread.
The logical network,
imposed on top of various real networks,
formed by the set of all interconnected sites
exchanging network news is called ``Usenet''
and was formed in 1979,
radiating out from Duke University.
Netnews is propagated
between cooperating machines
by a flooding algorithm,
with some loop prevention heuristics:
each machine sends its neighbours news that the
neighbours have (probably) not yet seen.
.PP
Flow of netnews between machines
may be achieved by use of any network
which can transmit an arbitrary stream of
(at least 7-bit)
ASCII code, unmodified.
If a network cannot transmit ASCII intact
(e.g. BITNET),
it is possible to encode netnews
before transmission across the network
and
decode it upon reception from the network.
Since one cannot be certain that
one's network neighbours will be up and
reachable at all times,
outgoing netnews must be queued,
at least in the case of network trouble.
To date,
at least
these networks,
protocols and media
have been used to transmit netnews correctly:
UUCP,
RS232,
NNTP,
Ethernet\(rg,
the ARPA Internet,
Datakit\(rg,
ACSnet,
magnetic tape,
SMTP,
and
BITNET,
though at least the last two require some form of encapsulation
to avoid corruption of articles;
SMTP because some common implementations get the newline-CRLF
mappings wrong,
thus throwing off byte counts in batches,
and
BITNET because of its Procrustean chopping,
expanding,
mapping,
bashing
and
smashing
of all data sent through it
(sending lines of 80 or fewer characters of
letters of either case and digits and plus and minus
appears to be safe).
.PP
Netnews arrives via some network,
which causes a command to be executed upon arrival
(e.g.
.I rnews ).
.I rnews
typically spools the inbound netnews for later processing.
Eventually
(often within the hour
or at the end of the business day),
the input queue is run
and the netnews is stored locally,
typically under
.I /usr/spool/news ,
and queued for transmission to netnews neighbours.
Once stored on disk,
netnews may be read by any of a collection of unprivileged news readers,
including
.I cat (1).
.I Expire
is run typically each night
to remove old netnews from disk.
.PP
C News was originally written to provide a
much faster and smaller,
more robust,
reliable
and
correct
implementation of netnews software than B 2.11 news.
We believe that C News is also
faster,
smaller
and
more robust
than B 3.0 news.
B 3.0 news has many more features;
take that as you will.
.SH
C News Components.
.PP
.I Rnews
invokes
the input subsystem,
which
spools incoming netnews in its original form,
as received,
typically in compressed batches.
Periodically,
the input queue should be run
by invoking
.I newsrun ,
thus uncompressing any compressed input
and feeding it to
.I relaynews .
.PP
.I Relaynews
files incoming netnews as articles on disk
and
initiates spooled transmission to other machines,
often by simply writing the names of the disk files
containing the articles on the ends of `batch' files of file names.
Quite a bit of policy from RFC 1036 is embedded in
.I relaynews .
.I inews
is a complex front-end for
.I relaynews
which implements much of the per-site policy on news posting.
.I inews
is a fairly-slow shell script which is adequately fast for most sites,
but it will need to be replaced by something more streamlined
for sites which gateway mailing lists into netnews,
for example.
.PP
The output
.I batcher
reads lists of file names
and
generates news batches
(see RFC 1036 or
.I news (5)
for the format)
of prescribed sizes
and queues the batches
for transmission to other sites.
The batcher is run asynchronously with
.I relaynews ,
typically once an hour
outside of business hours.
.PP
.I Expire
is generally run once per night
to remove from disk news articles older than a few days.
.I Expire
can use different expiry criterion for different newsgroups
and can archive articles instead of removing them.
.I Expire
also runs asynchronously
with
.I relaynews .
.PP
There are many news readers.
C News
comes with a limited news reader
(\c
.I readnews
by Michael Rourke)
sufficient to replace
long-winded
.I /etc/motd s
but you will want a heavy-duty news reader
if you plan to read more than local news groups.
We recommend
.I rn
by Larry Wall,
available from
your netnews neighbours
or
your nearby
.B comp.sources.unix
archive site.
There are others:
.I vn
and
.I vnews
are two.
.SH
Preparation for Installation
.PP
Netnews consumes a lot of disk space
and
often a lot of transmission time.
Here are some relevant measurements regarding a full netnews feed
as of the time of writing
(January 1989),
taken from
.I news.lists :
a day's netnews is about 3Mb and 1,400 articles
in 450 newsgroups.
Years ago,
sites often kept 14 days of netnews on disk,
but now many sites keep news for 3 to 5 days,
thus allowing for the occasional long weekend.
Thus a full news feed expired after 4 days will consume
about 12Mb.
Some people feel that news volume is doubling roughly every 16 months.
If this is true,
we can expect volume to increase by a factor of 10
in about 4 years
to 30Mb per day or 115Mb for 4 days.
It is thus wise planning to set aside a lot of disk space for netnews.
There are two ways to cope with ever-increasing volumes of netnews:
refuse to accept more newsgroups,
or
expire news after shorter intervals on disk.
A current full feed takes just over 7 hours to transmit at 1200 baud,
so for dial-up connections
one clearly wants the fastest modems one can afford.
.PP
Clearly,
transmitting a full news feed is a non-trivial commitment of resources,
so you may have some difficulty in finding a site willing to supply one.
Such a site may in turn expect you to feed yet other sites.
You will need to agree with your prospective netnews neighbour(s)
upon transfer media,
protocols
and
networks.
.PP
Before proceeding to install C News, you should read this document through
to the end, probably read the companion document
\fIThe Interface Between C News And The Outside World\fR,
and possibly read selected items in the
\fIC News Implementor's Notebook\fR and the manual pages.
.PP
You will need to
assign a user id and group id to netnews
(often new ids called ``news'');
initialise these directories:
NEWSCTL
(typically
.B /usr/lib/news ),
NEWSBIN
(\c
.B /usr/lib/newsbin ),
and
NEWSARTS
(\c
.B /usr/spool/news );
and
install each subsystem.
NEWSCTL and NEWSARTS
are logically one subtree,
defining a news data base,
but are split for backward compatibility with
older news software,
particularly old news readers.
NEWSBIN
contains programs and shell scripts
which might be common amongst machines sharing
a common architecture
(e.g. Sun 3's);
.Fn NEWSCTL /bin
may override these.
The goal is to install the subsystems,
integrate them into a working news system,
and
configure the news system to communicate with other news systems.
.PP
There are a few key files that must exist before any serious
attempt may be made to operate the news software.
.Fn NEWSCTL /active
is the list of newsgroups that this site knows
(is willing to accept or individually reject),
and must be owned by the
NEWS
userid
(the userid that owns
.Fn NEWSBIN /relay/relaynews ,
typically
.I news ).
You will probably want to get your initial
.Fn "" active
file from your upstream feed
and edit it to suit the set of groups you wish to receive.
Be sure to make the second field more than five digits wide,
by adding leading zeroes
(ten digits is a conservative width).
.Fn NEWSCTL /sys
defines the newsgroups that this site is willing to accept
and describes how they are to be forwarded to its neighbours.
.Fn NEWSCTL /server
contains the hostname of your file server,
if you have multiple machines sharing news
via a network file system.
.Fn NEWSCTL /whoami
similarly contains the name by which a cluster of machines
sharing news is to be known for purposes of news.
.Fn NEWSCTL /mailname
is optional and contains the full
(possibly dotted)
name by which your cluster is known for purposes
of mail.
.Fn NEWSCTL /organisation
(or
.Fn NEWSCTL /organization
if you insist)
contains the name of your organisation,
which will be copied into the
.B Organization:
header of articles posted locally,
by default.
.Fn NEWSCTL /mailpaths
defines mail routes to machines which contain aliases
for postings to moderated newsgroups.
.Fn NEWSCTL /log ,
.Fn NEWSCTL /errlog ,
.Fn NEWSCTL /history ,
.Fn NEWSCTL /history.dir ,
and
.Fn NEWSCTL /history.pag
must exist and be owned by the
NEWS
userid.
Tentative versions of all these files are built by the installation
procedures, but it is quite likely that you'll have to edit some of them.
.SH
C News Installation
.PP
Proceed to the
.Fn \& conf
directory of the distribution.
There is a major shell file here, named
.Fn \& build ,
that will interrogate
you at length and construct shell files to do the real work.
You may need to do
``chmod\ +x\ build'' before running it, to make it executable.
.PP
You will probably need your system's manuals on hand to answer
.Fn \& build 's
questions.
Another terminal (or another window, on a bitmap display) would also be
useful.
You'd best be prepared to take notes, also, as
.Fn \& build
will occasionally suggest that something be checked when you're done.
.PP
.Fn \& Build
itself does not alter any files or perform any installation
chores:  all it does is create shell files in the
.Fn \& conf
directory.
If you already know something about news software, or are merely
suspicious that
.Fn \& build
hasn't done everything right, you should
probably read the shell files before running them.
There are four of them:
.Fn \& doit.root ,
.Fn \& doit.bin ,
.Fn \& doit.news ,
and
.Fn \& again.root .
.PP
.Fn \& Doit.root
sets up the major directories for news, and sets their
ownerships correctly.
It typically will have to be run as \fIroot\fR to have adequate permissions
for all of this.
It is brief.
.PP
.Fn \& Doit.bin
does most of the work of building and installing the programs.
It should be run as the user who owns the distribution directories and will
own the executable programs under NEWSBIN.
.PP
.Fn \& Doit.news
does some other small chores and installs control files.
If any of the control files already exist, it will complain and refuse
to overwrite them, as a safety precaution.
It should be run as the owner of the news files.
Since many of the files it is installing are built by
.Fn \& doit.bin ,
that should be run first.
.PP
Finally,
.Fn \& again.root
tends to ownership and permission changes on
a few programs that need to run set-userid.
It requires the ability to change ownerships and to set permissions on
the files afterwards, which usually means running it as \fIroot\fR.
It too is brief.
.PP
There are undoubtedly strange systems out there that
.Fn \& build
and friends are not smart enough to cope with.
In such cases it will be necessary to edit the shell files before running
them, or to use them as guides and do the work by hand.
In particular, systems that require strange options in
.Fn \& Makefile s
will need to have those inserted by hand.
.PP
If you want to test pieces of C News without installing them, some
(not all) of the subsystems have a ``make\ r'' feature that runs a
regression test.
Note:  almost all of these require that
.Fn NEWSCTL /bin/config ,
or its local equivalent, be in place already so that shell files
can find out what PATH (etc.) they should be using.
.PP
Note that it is easy to build a test news system which is completely
independent of other existing news systems on the same machine,
or
to build one which shares its
.Fn NEWSBIN ""
with another C news system,
or shares input of articles
(e.g. running an old B news system
and a new C news system off the same stream of input
until you are confident that your new C news system is operating
to your satisfaction).
See
.I subst (1)
for the mechanism which permits quickly changing
all the places that know the location of
.Fn NEWSCTL /bin/config.
After that,
edit this news system's
.Fn NEWSCTL /bin/config
and things should be set up for separate existence.
.SH
First News
.PP
When you arrange to get a news feed from your neighbor, you should also
ask him to send you the current set of articles in the newsgroup
\fBnews.announce.newusers\fR.
Several of these are very important reading for people who are new to the net.
.SH
Unusual Systems
.PP
We believe that C News runs fine on 16-bit machines, but it hasn't been
tested very thoroughly on them lately.
It will not perform quite as well with the more limited space.
.PP
Machines with very old compilers can be a headache.
There are some hooks in
.Fn \& h/news.h
for doing without ``void'' and ``unsigned long'',
two particular problem areas, but they have to be arranged manually;
.Fn \& build
does not know about them.
.PP
Some very old systems cannot do \fIsetuid(geteuid())\fR, which makes it
impossible for a daemon to make directories and get the ownership right.
We provide a small program,
.Fn \& setnewsids ,
to run setuid-root.
.Fn \& Relaynews
knows about it and invokes it if \fIsetuid(geteuid())\fR fails;
it then sets permissions correctly and re-invokes
.Fn \& relaynews .
The code is short enough to be read and understood in full, so that the
suspicious system administrator can be sure that this setuid-root program
is not going to do something awful.