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News exchange

Pure Intranet My idea was to have a NNTP server on our local network, just for internal information in our department. No connections to the outside world! No connections to other servers (at least not now). This is possible. Just create a newsfeeds file with a single entry only:
ME:*,!control,!control.*,!junk,!local,!local.*/!local::
Catching up When using a watermark file, would it be possible to have a command line option in Chanx to catch-up? Without editing the last article number for each group by hand, I end up with a huge news download upon adding a new news server. Upgrade to version 1.2 and call Chanx with option -mC. Note, that this implies -mx.
Dupe checking At what point does Changi de-dupe? The reason I ask this is because I have the feeling that Chanx, when running in XOVER mode, seems to query each crossposted copy. This has been fixed in version 1.2.
Nothing to post Chanx told me there was nothing to post. If that's true, why is my spool directory full of files? I recently changed my provider. Most probably these files are still targeted to your previous provider. Their name should contain the first 7 letters of the target machine. You may make use of Chanx option -h to fake the name of the remote site:
chanx -h my.real.provider [more options] my.old.provider
   When I post a note, it is spooled, but it is never sent out. I'm running an old version of Changi. Nobody supports this old crap. Bye.

   Pleazzzzzze. SIGH! The most common problem with not getting out the local posts is, that Changi stores spoolfiles for the remote site without domain, while Chanx is looking for spoolfiles for the remote with fully qualified domain name. In this case you may try to remove the domain part from the NNTPSERVER environment.

Some very old versions btw. had a similar problem, but the other way round. But this is really old 16 bit stuff.

Can't post more than one message When running Changi 1.0 for OS/2 and posting more than one article between Chanx sessions, only my last post is sent to my provider. This is a bug in Changi 1.0. You need to upgrade to version 1.2.
Error 441 It is possible to have an option so that an NNTP-Posting-Host line is not added when posting a message to the server? Compu$erves news server disallows the IHAVE command, so I must use POST instead. But that gives a 441 error saying NNTP-Posting-Host lines are not allowed. Incidentally, the message was not sent and was dumped from the spool directory, thus losing it completely. No solution right now, but it's on the list.
   When Chanx tries to transmit a local post to the provider's news server I get an error message that says: 441 Illegal distribution... Most probably you misconfigured your newsreader. Default distribution is world.
PID file conflict I get news from several feeds and would love to have two or more versions of chanx going at once. This is stopped since Chanx detects its pid in the workdir. Starting from version 1.2, Chanx creates different pid files for different sites. With older versions you may set the environment variable CHANXPIDFILE to a different filename before starting Chanx.
Compressed batches I noticed that after using compressed batches I never got any replies back. I now see that changi uses #!gunbatch on the first line. I think it should be #!cunbatch. Is there any environment variable to change this? gunbatch is the common keyword when using gzip for compression. But not every uplink might support it.

Unfortunately there isn't any specific environment setting to change this behaviour, but we are lucky that Changi is buggy at that point.

The server uses the lowercase of the first character of CHANGICOMPRESSCALL, which defaults to gzip -c. Putting gzip on drive c: and setting CHANGICOMPRESSCALL to c:\gzip -c should do the trick.

host.last corrupted Running chanx -mp seems to corrupt the news.last file. No solution available except not to use this option.
Cancel spams Last night when I tried to fall asleep, I got an idea for a little tool that scans the whole message base and applies a filter to each article. If an article fits to the filter criteria, a cancel message for that article is being sent (distribution: world!). Cancel messages won't be accepted by news servers unless the header line 'Sender:' equals the sender of the original article.

On the other hand the sender entry is created by the server using reverse name lookup for the connected client. If Changi would allow clients to overwrite the sender entry, it little bit of security would become totally useless.

However, a coming version of Changi may allow overwriting the sender for cancels, but in that case create an extra X-Sender line containing the name of the posting site.

Keep in mind that, if you're able to cancel everybody's posts, then everybody may be able to cancel your posts as well. And not all people on the net are as friendly as expected.

UUPC article filter I'm using Changi with UUPC/extended. Is it possible to filter spam when articles are being received via UUCP? The docs only describe filtering when articles are being received with chanx via NNTP. Filtering spams is mainly done to reduce expensive online time, not to save cheap diskspace. So only Chanx is able to filter articles. Rnews or Changi itself don't offer such a feature.

There is a point on the list to enable the server to pass each incoming article to a filter program before storing it in the local newsbase. But nobody is able to tell, when this option will be available.

UUPC priority How can I make Changi to create jobs with a news priority?, Now all my uucp jobs got the same class, which is 'C'. UUPC normally uses class 'n' for news, which is a lower priority. This makes it possible to send/receive only mail during the day, and mail and news at non peak hours making things a little cheaper... This is one of the options added in the 0.9w -> 1.0 upgrade. A new Flag 'U' has been added to change the grade. Sample entry of newsfeeds:
lilly::L,Un:
Note, that U implies TU.
   Hmm. I'm a little confused here. I have now added xs4all::F,TUc,S400000: to my newsfeeds file to create batches of a maximum of 400000 bytes. It seems to me that TUc conflicts with Un, or am I wrong here? T is a flag and U is one. T accepts options like U, in which case U is an option, not a flag. On the other hand there's a flag called U, which in turn accepts options like n.

Totally confused now?

In other words, you can't use TUc, because c would be interpreted as an option of T.

You may, however, use 'TU,Un'. If you specify TU, then UC is the default. If you specify Un, TU is implicitly included. So, 'TU,Un' is equal to Un.

UUPC spool command My provider told me, that Changi's line
R news any.fqdn
in one of the spool files is not following the rules.
This bug had been copied from UUPC. Most *NIX version of uucp are aware of this and will accept such spools without problem.

The correct version is

R any.fqdn!news
and will hopefully be used by the next version of Changi.

 

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