Afloyd.206 net.news utzoo!decvax!harpo!floyd!trb Fri May 7 15:27:28 1982 netnews acting flakey? I had a pre-release version of netnews (pre-2.6). It came with NEWSUSR = daemon and NEWSGRP = sys. 2.6 came with both of those vars set to "news." Therefore, if you installed 2.6 netnews over some older version, 2.6 might not be able to write into your "active" file because of bad uids. If you are the "usenet" user, you should be getting control messages now and then informing you about new groups. If this doesn't happen, then something is wrong. Check (at least) to make sure that your "active" file is getting properly written. Mine wasn't, and I've heard confused mutterings from other folks indicating that they were having similar problems (one fellow here said that in order to read new news he'd have to cd to /usr/spool/news and cat it, that sounds like a bad "active" file to me...) One telling thing to do is make a new active file. You can do this by ls'ing /usr/spool/news and then filling in the tails of names (net.unix-wizar should be edited to be net.unix-wizards.) If you have "all" in your subscription list (and you !subscribe to groups that bore you) and you run readnews with this new active file, and you see messages for groups you never knew existed, then you are the victim of a bad active file. Make sure netnews can read and write it. Andy Tannenbaum Bell Labs Whippany, NJ (201) 386-6491 ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.