Maintenance Tools and Tasks

Tools and Tasks Despite the complexity of C-News, a news administrator's life can be fairly easy, because C-News provides you with a wide variety of maintenance tools. Some of these are intended to be run regularly from cron, like newsdaily. Using these scripts reduces daily care and feeding requirements of your C-News installation greatly.

Unless stated otherwise, these commands are located in /usr/lib/news/bin/maint. Note that you must become user news before invoking these commands. Running them as super-user may render these files inaccessible to C-News.

newsdaily

The name already says it: runs this once a day. It is an important script that helps you keep log files small, retain- ing copies of each from the last three runs. It also tries to sense any anomalies, like stale batches in the incoming and outgoing directories, postings to unknown or moderated news- groups, etc. Resulting error messages will be mailed to the newsmaster.

newswatch

This is a script that should be run regularly to look for anomalies in the news system, once an hour or so. It is intended to detect problems that will have immediate effect on the operability of your news system and mail a trouble report to the newsmaster. Things checked include stale lock files that don't get removed, unattended input batches, and disk space shortage.

addgroup

Adds a group to your site locally. The proper invocation is

                     addgroup groupname y|n|m|=realgroup

The second argument has the same meaning as the flag in the active file, meaning that anyone may post to the group (y), that no-one may post (n), that it is moderated (m), or that it is an alias for another group (=realgroup).

You might also want to use addgroup when the first arti- cles in a newly created group arrive earlier than the newgroup control message that is intended to create it.

delgroup

Allows you to delete a group locally. Invoke it as

                     delgroup groupname

You still have to delete the articles that remain in the newsgroup's spool directory. Alternatively, you might leave it to the natural course of events (a.k.a. expire) to make them go away.

addmissing

Adds missing articles to the history file. Run this script when there are articles that seem to hang around forever.(11)

newsboot

This script should be run at system boot time. It removes any lock files left over when news processes were killed at shut- down, and closes and executes any batches left over from NNTP connections that were terminated when shutting down the sys- tem.

newsrunning

This resides in /usr/lib/news/bin/input, and may be used to disable un-batching of incoming news, for instance during work hours. You may turn off un-batching by invoking

                     /usr/lib/news/bin/input/newsrunning off