Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site lsuc.UUCP Path: utzoo!utcs!lsuc!msb From: msb@lsuc.UUCP (Mark Brader) Newsgroups: net.news,net.news.b Subject: Re: Netnews failed Message-ID: <680@lsuc.UUCP> Date: Sat, 29-Jun-85 13:14:31 EDT Article-I.D.: lsuc.680 Posted: Sat Jun 29 13:14:31 1985 Date-Received: Sat, 29-Jun-85 14:18:44 EDT References: <162@epson.UUCP> <225@ncr-tp.UUCP> Reply-To: msb@lsuc.UUCP (Mark Brader|LSUC|Toronto) Organization: Law Society of Upper Canada, Toronto Lines: 31 Xref: utcs net.news:3096 net.news.b:999 Summary: This will at least give you a chance to see what happened We, too, were getting a number of "inbound batch is garbled" messages at one time. Accordingly, I replaced the tiny shell script "cunbatch" by the following version. It does the same as "cunbatch" does, but in the event of failure, it keeps the file around and sends mail about it. PATH=/bin:/usr/bin export PATH N=/tmp/news$$ cat >$N if test ! -s $N || compress -d <$N | rnews then rm $N else (ls -l $N; file $N) | mail -s "Cunbatch failure!" news fi This runs under a V7 type system using sh, with compress and rnews in /usr/bin. Other systems will want to modify appropriately. Notice that it tests whether the file is nonempty before doing anything. Most of our garbled batches turned out to be simply empty files that shouldn't have been transmitted. The "inbound batch is garbled" message comes from inews (rnews), so this script is not applicable if you receive news without compression. However, I think you could break the inews-rnews link and install a similar script (without the compress -d) as rnews. Mark Brader P.S. We modified the "file" command locally so that it knows about compressed files, and even tells us how many bits, since we only accept <=13 bits here.