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When receiving an article, nntpd has to deliver it to the news
subsystem. Depending on whether it was received as a result of an
IHAVE or POST command, the article is handed to
rnews or inews, respectively. Instead of invoking
rnews, you may also configure it (at compile time) to batch the
incoming articles and move the resulting batches to
/var/spool/news/in.coming, where they are left for relaynews to
pick them up at the next queue run.
To be able to properly perform the ihave/sendme protocol, nntpd
has to be able to access the history file. At compile time, you
therefore have to make sure the path is set correctly. You should also
make sure that C-news and nntpd agree on the format of your
history file. C-news uses dbm hashing functions to access it;
however, there are quite a number of different and slightly incompatible
implementations of the dbm library. If C-news has been linked
with the a different dbm library than you have in your standard
libc, you have to link nntpd with this library, too.
A typical symptom of nntpd and C-news disagreeing on the database
format are error messages in the system log that nntpd could not
open it properly, or duplicate articles received via NNTP. A good test
is to pick an article from your spool area, telnet to the nntp
port, and offer it to nntpd as shown in the example below (your
input is marked like this). Of course, you have to replace
<msg@id> with the message-ID of the article you want to feed
to nntpd again.
$ telnet localhost nntp
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost
Escape characters is '^]'.
201 vstout NNTP[auth] server version 1.5.11t (16 November
1991) ready at Sun Feb 6 16:02:32 1194 (no posting)
IHAVE
435 Got it.
QUIT
This conversation shows the proper reaction of nntpd; the message
``Got it'' tells you that it already has this article. If you get
a message of ``335 Ok'' instead, the lookup in the history file
failed for some reason. Terminate the conversation by typing Ctrl-D.
You can check what has gone wrong by checking the system log;
nntpd logs all kinds of messages to the daemon facility
of syslog. An incompatible dbm library usually manifests
itself in a message complaining that dbminit failed.
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Next: Newsreader Configuration
Up: A Description of NNTP
Previous: NNTP Authorization
Andrew Anderson
Thu Mar 7 23:22:06 EST 1996
