The active file is located in /etc/, and lists all groups known at your site and the articles currently online. You will rarely have to touch it, but we explain it nevertheless for sake of completion. Entries take the following form:
newsgroup high low perm
newsgroup is the group's name. low and high are the lowest and highest numbers of articles currently available. If none are available at the moment, low is equal to high+1.
At least that's what the low field is meant to do. However, for efficiency, C News doesn't update this field. This wouldn't be such a big loss if there weren't newsreaders that depend on it. For instance, trn checks this field to see if it can purge any articles from its thread database. To update the low field, you therefore have to run the updatemin command regularly (or, in earlier versions of C News, the upact script).
perm is a parameter detailing the access users are granted to the group. It takes one of the following values:
y
Users are allowed to post to this group.
n
Users are not allowed to post to this group. However, the group may still be read.
x
This group has been disabled locally. This happens sometimes when news administrators (or their superiors) take offense at articles posted to certain groups.
Articles received for this group are not stored locally, although they are forwarded to the sites that request them.
m
This denotes a moderated group. When a user tries to post to this group, an intelligent newsreader notifies her of this and send the article to the moderator instead. The moderator's address is taken from the moderators file in /var/lib/news.
= real-group
This marks newsgroup as being a local alias for another group, namely real-group. All articles posted to newsgroup will be redirected to it.
In C News, you will generally not have to access this file directly. Groups can be added or deleted locally using addgroup and delgroup (see the section 'Maintenance Tools and Tasks' later in this chapter). A newgroup control message adds a group for the whole of Usenet, while a rmgroup message deletes a group. Never send such a message yourself! For instructions on how to create a newsgroup, read the monthly postings in news.announce.newusers.
The active.times file is closely related to the active file. Whenever a group is created, C News logs a message to this file containing the name of the group created, the date of creation, whether it was done by a newgroup control message or locally, and who did it. This is convenient for newsreaders that may notify the user of any recently created groups. It is also used by the NEWGROUPS command of NNTP.
News batches follow a particular format that is the same for B News, C News, and INN. Each article is preceded by a line like this:
#! rnews count
count is the number of bytes in the article. When you use batch compression, the resulting file is compressed as a whole and preceded by another line, indicated by the message to be used for unpacking. The standard compression tool is compress, which is marked by:
#! cunbatch
Sometimes, when the news server sends batches via mail software that removes the eighth bit from all data, a compressed batch may be protected using what is called c7-encoding; these batches will be marked by c7unbatch.
When a batch is fed to rnews on the remote site, it checks for these markers and processes the batch appropriately. Some sites also use other compression tools, like gzip, and precede their gzipped files with the word zunbatch instead. C News does not recognize nonstandard headers like these; you have to modify the source to support them.
In C News, article batching is performed by /usr/lib/news/batch/sendbatches, which takes a list of articles from the site/togo file and puts them into several newsbatches. It should be executed once per hour, or even more frequently, depending on the volume of traffic. Its operation is controlled by the batchparms file in /var/lib/news. This file describes the maximum batch size allowed for each site, the batching and optional compression program to be used, and the transport for delivering it to the remote site. You may specify batching parameters on a per-site basis, as well as a set of default parameters for sites not explicitly mentioned.
When installing C News, you will most likely find a batchparms file in your distribution that contains a reasonable default entry, so there's a good chance that you won't have to touch the file. Just in case, we describe its format. Each line consists of six fields, separated by spaces or tabs:
site size max batcher muncher transport
site
site is the name of the site to which the entry applies. The togo file for this site must reside in out.going/togo below the news spool. A site name of /default/ denotes the default entry and is to match any site not directly specified with an entry unique to it.
size
size is the maximum size of article batches created (before compression). For single articles larger than this, C News makes an exception and puts each in a single batch by itself.
max
max is the maximum number of batches created and scheduled for transfer before batching stalls for this particular site. This is useful in case the remote site should be down for a long time, because it prevents C News from cluttering your UUCP spool directories with zillions of newsbatches.
C News determines the number of queued batches using the queuelen script in /usr/lib/news/. If you've installed C News in a prepackaged format, the script should not need any editing, but if you choose to use a different flavor of spool directories, for example, Taylor UUCP, you might have to write your own. If you don't care about the number of spool files (because you're the only person using your computer and you don't write articles by the megabyte), you may replace the script's contents by a simple exit 0 statement.
batcher
The batcher field contains the command used for producing a batch from the list of articles in the togo file. For regular feeds, this is usually batcher. For other purposes,
