NEWSOUTPUT(8) System Manager's Manual NEWSOUTPUT(8)
NAME
newsoutput, newsinput - notes/news gateway programs
SYNOPSIS
newsoutput [ -a or -ssysname or -c filename ] [ -b ] [ -v ] [ -o date-spec ] [ -f file ] topic [ ... ]
newsinput [ -t ] [ -1 ]
DESCRIPTION
Newsoutput and newsinput manage the transfer of articles between a notesfile system and a news system.
Newsoutput gateways notesfile-generated articles to the news system. Several options determine the types of articles to be transfered.
The -a option specifies that any notesfile-generated article that has not been in the news system before is to be sent to news. The -ssys-
name option specifies that only articles from sysname are to be sent to the news system. The -c option directs newsoutput to gateway arti-
cles written at any of the systems whose names appear in the file filename. If none of these options is specified, only locally generated
articles are sent to the news. In normal operation, the -a or -c options are most typically used; -s is included for backwards compatibil-
ity.
The -b option specifies that newsoutput should generate articles which will be parsed correctly by previous versions of the notesfile/news
gateway code. Files containing lists of notesfiles can be specified through the -f option. Use -v for a more verbose output than normal;
default operation produces a summary of notes and responses transmitted for each notesfile with traffic.
The -o option specifies that only articles that arrived on the local system after date-spec are to be considered for transmittal to news.
The timestamp file is updated after the execution of newsoutput whether the -o option is specified.
The actual method of insertion into the news system is determined in the ``net.how'' file by the transmission method for the pseudo-site
``Usenet''. Mappings between notesfiles and newsgroups are specified in the file ``/usr/spool/notes/.utilities/newsgroups''.
The newsinput program accepts articles from the news system, parses headers, maps newsgroups to appropriate notesfiles, and inserts the
articles. News' control messages are intercepted and placed in a maintainence notesfile for review by the system manager. When a news
article maps to a non-existent notesfile, the notesfile is automatically created.
The -t directs newsinput to NOT log cases where the Message-Id is longer than the reserved space in the note descriptor. These occurences
are normally logged in the nfmaint notesfile. The -1 option directs newsinput to place the article in the first notesfile on the News-
groups line. The normal action is to place a copy of the article in each notesfile specified on the Newsgroups line.
Typically newsoutput is run by cron(8) at intervals ranging from hourly to daily. Newsinput is invoked automatically by the news system
when it propogates articles. See appendix B of The Notesfile Reference Manual for a more detailed discussion on configuring and installing
a notesfile-news gateway.
The notesfile-news mapping function used the file /usr/spool/notes/.utilities to map names between the two systems. The mapping functions
allow simple one-for-one name mapping, one-to-many mapping, and mapping ``basenotes'' and responses from one notesfile to separate news-
groups. See appendix B of The Notesfile Reference Manual for more information on how this works.
BUGS
News articles which can definitely be marked as responses because they have a ``References'' line but whose parents can't be found by arti-
cle-ID or by guessing from the title are not counted as orphans. This is due to problems arising from mapping of article-ID's to allow a
notesfile and news system to coexist on the same host.
newsinput doesn't correctly do one-to-many mapping of newsgroups to notesfiles. Newsoutput does do one-to-many mapping of notesfiles to
newsgroups.
Since the author's system may not have seen the article yet (if he wrote it via nfmail for example), the ``Path:'' header line may not
point anywhere near the author.
The ``Path'' line generated contains full-domain information and doesn't necessarily point at the author. News systems 2.10.2 and earlier
still assume that the last component of this header line is an author name and treat it specially.
The Message-Id field is set at 32 bytes in Notes 1.7. This should be made longer. 64 bytes is probably adequate.
Because colons are used as delimiters in the notesfile transfer format, Message-Id's with colons are declared "UnManageable" and ignored.
FILES
/usr/spool/notes/.utilities where these programs live.
/usr/spool/notes/.utilities/newsgroups mapping between notesfiles and newsgroups
/usr/spool/notes/.utilities/net.how Pseudo-site ``Usenet'' specifies how to insert news articles.
SEE ALSO
news(1), notes(1), nfxmit(8), uucp(1),
The Notesfile Reference Manual
AUTHORS
Ray Essick (uiucdcs!essick, essick%uiuc@csnet-relay.arpa)
Department of Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, IL
Rob Kolstad (kolstad@convex.UUCP)
CONVEX Computer Corporation
Richardson, TX
University of Illinois NEWSOUTPUT(8)