RELAYNEWS

Section: Maintenance Commands (8)
Updated: 28 May 1989
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NAME

relaynews - store and forward netnews articles

SYNOPSIS

relaynews [ -inrs ] [ -d fhlmt ] [ -x excluded-site ]

DESCRIPTION

Relaynews installs locally and broadcasts (network) news articles read from its standard input. Typically the articles will be in a batch (see news(5)), which may not be compressed (see compress(1)). Articles are usually queued for transmission to one's netnews neighbours via newsbatch(8) and thence via uux(1) or mail(1).

-d turns on debugging of filing, headers, locking, matching, transmission. -r redirects stdout and stderr to /usr/lib/news/log and /usr/lib/news/errlog. -i redirects stdout only to /usr/lib/news/log. -n enables ``NNTP mode'' in which history entries are generated as articles are rejected. -s makes discarding an article a serious matter. -x excludes excluded-site from the list of netnews neighbours to receive article(s).

Control messages, recognised by their Control: headers (or for backward compatibility ONLY a Newsgroups: header containing a single newsgroup ending in .ctl), are filed under the control pseudo-group only, but are forwarded as usual, by examining their Newsgroups: and Distribution: headers. Note that posting to the control pseudo-group will not cause a message to be treated as a control message; control is not a real newsgroup.

Articles which contain no locally-known (to the active file) newsgroups yet accepted by the local subscription list are filed exactly once, in the junk pseudo-group, and forwarded as usual. In particular, if all newsgroups in the article are refused by the local subscription list or are refused by an x in active file entries, then the article will be discarded and not filed in junk.

Locally-generated articles need not be permitted by the local subscription list but are otherwise processed normally; this is for backward compatibility and perhaps to keep the local subscription list short by not requiring general and the like to be named.

FILES

/usr/spool/news: netnews article tree
/usr/spool/news/comp/unix/wizards: example newsgroup directory (for comp.unix.wizards)
/usr/spool/news/out.going/system/togo: default sys file F, f and I flags filename
/usr/lib/news/sys: determines who receives broadcast netnews articles, which ones, and how they are to be sent articles
/usr/lib/news/active: contains locally-legal newsgroups and (un)moderated flag
/usr/lib/news/history: record of articles received
/usr/lib/news/history.{dir,pag}: dbm(3) index into history
/usr/lib/news/whoami: if present, contains news system's site name, overriding any other host names
/usr/lib/news/log: log of incoming articles
/usr/lib/news/errlog: log of errors, should be empty
/usr/lib/news/bin: system-specific directory of programs to override /usr/lib/newsbin and its subdirectories
/usr/lib/newsbin/ctl: common directory of programs to implement control messages
/usr/lib/newsbin/relay/relaynews: the lean, mean news-relayin' machine
/usr/lib/newsbin/newsreply: generates a return address from article headers

DIAGNOSTICS

Usually found in /usr/lib/news/errlog.
Relaynews's exit status is a bit vector of status bits; see news/include/news.h for the bit definitions.

HISTORY

Written by Geoff Collyer at the University of Toronto as part of the C news project.

BUGS

An article with a header that does not fit entirely in a static buffer and on a machine without real links (e.g. something like Eunice but on a PDP-11) will be filed incorrectly: any symbolic links under /usr/spool/news will point at a non-existent filename.
A control message which cannot be filed in the control pseudo-group and which cannot be filed in the junk pseudo-group because junk is not in the active file will generate an error message which refers to the groups in its Newsgroups: header instead of referring to the control pseudo-group.
Relaynews could run faster in some circumstances and would be simpler if Control: were required to be the first header, if present, and if Newsgroups: were required to be the next.

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 05:46:27 GMT, January 05, 2023