Managing Dnews

Renaming a Unix Volume

You may wish to rename a current volume /var/spool/news to be /var/spool/dnews, to do this:

cd /var/spool/news
mkdir OLD
mv * OLD
umount /var/spool/news
emacs /etc/vfstab (or /etc/fstab)
(change /news into /dnews)
mount /var/spool/dnews
(When you are happy with the new system, or you need the space:)
rm -r /var/spool/dnews/OLD

Posting to a moderated group

Note: You can only do this to your own moderated local groups.

Get the FreeAgent news reader. In agent.ini change showallfields to 1, e.g.

[Message]
ShowAllFields=1

Then re-post the article after putting your mail address in the approved header using freeagent.
HINT: when reading the log files, it is easy to confuse an error message from DNEWS with an error message that dnews got while talking to your feeding site. Usually if the error looks like:

Status {223 transfer permission denied}

then it came from somewhere else, not your system.

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Creating local news groups

If you wish to have local groups on your server, that are not on the server you 'suck' from, then you should remove the 'POSTING' flag from the feed to your feeder site (in newsfeeds.conf). But only if you can get ihave or transfer permission to send articles up stream rather than simple 'posting' access.
You can add groups with the TELLNEWS NEWGROUP command, e.g.

tellnews newgroup here.chat y myname Local group for chatting

here.chat = name of group
y = Normal group (m = moderated)
myname = Just a record of who created the group (one word)
Local group for chatting = description for active.names file.

To stop your local group from being sent up stream, you would change the line in your newsfeeds.conf file:

groups *,!here.chat,!here.secret.*

NOTE: KNOWN BUG, with version 2.0 items will still be sent upstream if you have left the 'POSTING' keyword in your feed. This will probably be fixed in a future version

Remote Control

Dnews on any platform may be controlled remotely, the local machine may be running a different OS to the remote dnews machine, hence it is possible to use the graphical interfaces to control non graphical versions of dnews. To set this up the local machine must have a copy of the tellnews executable and the tellnews.pass file, the tellnews.pass file is a protected file on the dnews machine used to verify that the correct machine is sending commands.

Putting News On More Than One Drive

Unix: Symbolic links can be used to put specific hierachies on specific drives, there is a pitfall associated with doing this however, the percentage use on each of the drives in use needs to balanced to make the expire process work correctly. Alternatively the expire can be set up to apply a single rule to each hierachy that is on a different disk.

Windows NT: In the disk manager, which is one of the control panels, volume sets can be created and expanded, these settings can be used to add one disk to another. The space that is being added must be empty and not allocated to another drive.

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Giving DNEWS access to an INN news system.

Give normal NEWS READER access to the dnews machine by adding a line to your nnrp.access file
dnews.ip.name:read post:::*
Give DNEWS ihave access to your server Add a line to hosts.nntp
dnews.ip.name

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