UUCP documentation

[rra]

Reported by eagle on 14 Dec 2008 08:50 UTC
We should have documentation of how UUCP article feeds work and exactly what's needed to set it up and make it work. Here are some old notes from Andrew Gierth and Olaf Titz.

To be precise, the feeding site batches up articles from a feed (using batcher), and sends them via uucp by invoking (e.g. via the -p option of batcher) a command of the form:

uux - [options](other) sitename!rnews

which means "invoke the command 'rnews' on host 'sitename', using standard input from the uux command".

(The example given in the batcher manpage is to use:

(echo '#! cunbatch'; exec compress) | uux - -r -z %s!rnews

as a -p option to batcher; this compresses the batch first.)

The receiving site shouldn't need to do anything other than ensure that rnews is permitted to the sending site, and that uucp is otherwise working, which means, at least for recent INN versions, make sure that:

• you have a symlink of ~news/bin/rnews to /bin (so uuxqt finds it)
• rnews is installed setgid news and executable for the uucp user

This is not done automatically, the set[ug]id thing has to be enabled in configure now.