Chapter 7. Adding More Feeds

There are a number of combinations and permutations involved when it comes to adding additoional feeds to an existing feed,

Add a second suck when the existing feed is a suck. Add an Ihave feed to an existing suck. Add a suck feed to and existing Ihave feed. Add another Ihave feed to an existeing Ihave feed.

7. Complex Feeds

Dnews can be used with different kinds of feeds such as a feed via satellite, or from a bbs or some other such thing that's not a regular news feed, these are generally in a UUCP format.

Xmit - a main page for the appendices ???

What is UUCP ??? - add the relevant section here

Gatewaying Mailing Lists

CAUTION, gatewaying mailing lists to public news groups is a little risky, don't do it lightly.

Two gateways are needed to make a news group and a mailing list 'identical', you must setup both so that a news post gets sent to the mailing list and so a mailing post gets posted to the news group.

Setting up a gateway from a "NEWS group" to a "MAILING LIST"

In newsfeeds.conf add a feed for the group you wish to gateway, the 'site' name can be anything meaningful to you.

site juggling groups rec.juggling< (This will make dnews create juggling.feed in the workarea directory)

Now to actually send the items, setup an xmit process for each mailing list. To do this edit addmail.cmd (which will be in /dnews with luck)

notepad addmail.cmd
Change the -name to be the name in newsfeeds.conf
Change MAIL.HERE.COM to point to your mail server
Change JUGLIST@HERE.COM to point to the actual mailing list
addsvc -del dxmail1
addsvc -add dxmail1 xmit.exe

"dxmail1 MAIL.HERE.COM -at *5* -mail (should all be on the same line)JUGLIST@HERE.COM -name juggling"
addmail.cmd (run the script to add the service)
Restart things:
tellnews reload
Start the xmit service in Control Panels (for nt)
Test the mailing list, if a loop occurs, disable it quickly and figure out why.

Setting up a gateway from a MAILING LIST to a NEWS GROUP (Windows NT only)

First setup DROBOT to run from ntmail, in control panels run the NTMail admin tool. Click on 'executables' and enter a name for this gateway, e.g.

juglist-robot

(You will then need to add this user to your juglist mailing list, e.g. juglist-robot@here.com, so that this robot will get all messages that are posted to the mailing list)

In the command line box type in:

drobot -dir c:\ntmail\news -groups rec.juggling
Now, setup the service to post these items.
addsvc -del dposter
addsvc -add dposter dposter.exe "dposter -dir c:\ntmail\news -to news.here.com"

Now start the services (from control panel) and then test posting a message and mailing a message to the mailing list and see if the newsgroup and mailing list are kept inline.

Setting up a UUCP feed into DNEWS

In dnews.conf add

suck_uucp c:\uucp\in\*.bag

The BAG/UUCP file format is:

#! rnews nnnn

...(article, exactly nnnn bytes, counting each end of line as one byte)

#! rnews nnnn

...(next article)...

Setting up a UUCP feed out of DNEWS

In newsfeeds.conf add a feed, e.g.

site site1.name.uucp

type uucp

uucp_dir c:\uucp\out

groups *

This will create files called news000n.bag in the directory c:\uucp\out It's your job to uucp copy these to the destination sites, and delete them. If you want you can compress them first. :-)

The format of the file is:

#! rnews nnnn

...(article, exactly nnnn bytes, counting each end of line as one byte)

#! rnews nnnn

...(next article)...

The XMIT Process

(XMIT (Setting up full feeds)

This is necessary when you want to send a full feed onto another site. If you are a leaf site then you DONT NEED TO DO THIS !!!!!! First add entries to your NEWSFEEDS.CONF file, this creates the file site_name.feed, then you need to setup a timed job to send those items to the other sites using NNTP IHAVE (or streaming extensions)

You should set all groups as cached, in dnews.conf add a line:

cachedall true

XMIT (On unix)

Add lines to your rc.local procedure, e.g.

cd /usr/local/dnews

./xmit send.to.site.name -at "*2" "*"

./xmit send.other.site.name -at "*7" "*"

XMIT (On Windows NT)

On windows NT you need to setup each xmit job as a service, to do this use the program ADDSVC.EXE which came with the dnews distribution to add a service for each outgoing feed, e.g. (see setupsvc.cmd)

addsvc -add dxmit1 xmit.exe "dxmit1 site.name.edu -at *5 *"

addsvc -add dxmit2 xmit.exe "dxmit2 site2.name.edu -at *5 *"

Then from CONTROL PANEL, SERVICES, and start the feeds.

XMIT (On VMS)

See RUNXMIT.COM