Chapter 21. C News

Table of Contents
21.1. Delivering News
21.2. Installation
21.3. The sys File
21.4. The active File
21.5. Article Batching
21.6. Expiring News
21.7. Miscellaneous Files
21.8. Control Messages
21.8.1. The cancel Message
21.8.2. newgroup and rmgroup
21.8.3. The checkgroups Message
21.8.4. sendsys, version, and senduuname
21.9. C News in an NFS Environment
21.10. Maintenance Tools and Tasks

One of the most popular software packages for Netnews is C News. It was designed for sites that carry news over UUCP links. This chapter will discuss the central concepts of C News, basic installation, and maintenance tasks.

C News stores its configuration files in /etc/news, and most of its binaries are kept below the /usr/lib/news/ directory. Articles are kept below /var/spool/news. You should make sure that virtually all files in these directories are owned by user news or group news. Most problems arise from files being inaccessible to C News. Use su to become the user news before you touch anything in the directory. The only exception is the setnewsids command, which is used to set the real user ID of some news programs. It must be owned by root and have the setuid bit set.

In this chapter, we describe all C News configuration files in detail and show you what you have to do to keep your site running.