Despite the complexity of C News, a news administrator's life can be fairly
easy; C News provides you with a wide variety of maintenance tools.
Some of these are intended to be run regularly from cron,
like newsdaily. Using these scripts greatly reduces
daily care and feeding requirements of your C News installation.
Unless stated otherwise, these commands are located in
/usr/lib/news/maint. (Note that you must become user
news before invoking these commands.
Running them as a superuser may render critical newsfiles inaccessible to C News.):
newsdaily
The name already says it: run this once a day. It is an important script
that helps you keep log files small, retaining copies of each from the last
three runs. It also tries to sense anomalies, like stale batches in the
incoming and outgoing directories, postings to unknown or moderated newsgroups,
etc. Resulting error messages are mailed to the newsmaster.
newswatch
This script should be run regularly to look for anomalies in the
news system, once an hour or so. It is intended to detect problems that will
have an immediate effect on the operability of your news system, in which case it mails a trouble report to the newsmaster. Things checked include stale lock files
that don't get removed, unattended input batches, and disk space shortage.
addgroup
This script adds a group to your site locally. The proper invocation is:
addgroup groupname y|n|m|=realgroup
The second argument has the same meaning as the flag in the
active file, meaning that anyone may post to the group
(y), that no one may post
(n), that it is moderated
(m), or that it is an alias for another
group (=realgroup). You might also want to use addgroup when the
first articles in a newly created group arrive earlier than the
newgroup control message that is
intended to create it.
delgroup
This script allows you to delete a group locally. Invoke it as:
delgroup groupname
You still have to delete the articles that remain in the newsgroup's spool
directory. Alternatively, you might leave it to the natural course of events
(i.e., expiration) to make them go away.
addmissing
This script adds missing articles to the history
file. Run it when there are articles that seem to hang around forever.
newsboot
This script should be run at system boot time. It removes any lock files
left over when news processes were killed at shutdown, and closes and executes
any batches left over from NNTP connections that were terminated when shutting
down the system.
newsrunning
This script resides in /usr/lib/news/input and may be used to disable unbatching of incoming news, for instance during work hours. You may turn off unbatching by invoking:
