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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.