``yer about to be boarded, ye scurvy network news dogs! har har ...'' -- Oliver Wendell Jones, Bloom County Hacker & Cracker ``No news is good news.'' ``When bigger machines are built, netnews will saturate them.'' ``USENET -- All the news that's fit to `N'.'' -- /usr/games/fortune ``Net news is the television of computing.'' -- Geoff Collyer On older systems, you will to also install a small program, setnewids, setuid-root. If this worries you, read setnewsids.c; all it does is execute setgid(), setuid() to the "news" group and user if they exist, otherwise relaynews's real ids. Setnewsids can be found in ../conf. You can test relaynews by giving NEWSCTL, NEWSBIN or NEWSARTS environment variables to change the library, binary or spool directories and I encourage this. If you plan to run rn, you'll need a recent rn which honours Xref: in the absence of Relay-Version:, which has been banished. patchlevel 40 or greater should be fine; patchlevel 40 works fine. You will need to put your site name in /usr/lib/news/mailname (../conf/build looks after all this). No upper case letters in your name please, there is no call for it and it just looks uGLy. You must only permit relaynews to run on file servers since newsboot clears all locks in /usr/lib/news. You'll need compress for compressing or uncompressing batches of news. See the contact person of your news feed or the moderator of the newsgroup comp.sources.unix (try uunet!sources). See the anews directory for conversion filters from A to B and back. You'll need to install /usr/lib/newsbin/gngp (see ../misc) before inews will work. B-2.11-isms. Your /usr/lib/news/mailpaths file must be updated to point at your nearest backbone site. A 5th sys file field for Distribution: patterns is available (add them in sys after the subscription list, separated by "/"), and a 6th field for excluded hosts is also, separated by "/" from the system name. Good Luck. Geoff Collyer