
UUCP for DNews
==============

version 0.1

by Matt McLeod, <mjm@attila.apana.org.au>


Description
-----------

This package gets DNews to work with UUCP.  It has been tested
with DNews 4.5i and FreeBSD 2.2.1-RELEASE.  It should work with
other systems.

There are two parts:  "batcher", a simple shellscript which
converts DNews "bag" files to compressed newsbatches then
queues them with uux.  It supports as many UUCP nodes as
you care to.

Then there is "rnews", a simple shellscript which uncompresses
an incoming newsbatch and dumps the result into the DNews
"bag" file incoming directory.  It is usually called by uuxqt.

Installation
------------

1)  Put rnews somewhere in your UUCP path (/usr/bin is usually
    a good place).

2)  Put batcher wherever you like (/usr/local/dnews is not a bad
    choice).

3)  Create the uucp-batches hierachy.  This is one directory per
    UUCP node, plus "incoming".  Dnews must be able to read/write
    all of these.  The user who runs "batcher" must also be able
    to read/write all but "incoming".  The user who runs "rnews"
    (usually "uucp") must be able to read/write "incoming".

    For example, I have /var/spool/uucp-batches:

    drwxr-xr-x  2 news  news    512 Dec 14 14:45 abaris
    drwxr-xr-x  2 news  news    512 Dec 14 14:43 esmay
    drwxrwxr-x  2 uucp  wheel  3072 Dec 14 17:13 incoming
    drwxr-xr-x  2 news  news    512 Dec 14 14:15 rivendell

4)  Add feeds for each UUCP node in your newsfeeds.conf:

    site esmay.apana.org.au
            groups apana.hunter.*,apana.announce,apana.general,ncle.*
            type uucp
            uucp_dir /var/spool/uucp-batches/esmay
            uucp_size 4000000
            uucp_n 500

5)  Add a line like this to dnews.conf:

    suck_uucp       /var/spool/uucp-batches/incoming/*.bag

6)  Reload your dnews configs:

    tellnews reload

7)  Edit batcher.  The NODES variable is a space-seperated list of
    UUCP nodes to batch for.

8)  Run batcher from cron.  I do this as user "news", every half hour.

9)  Optionally, add each of your UUCP nodes to the gupcgi configs - I
    find this *very* handy - no more requests for newsfeed changes.  :-)

