Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!ut-sally!ut-emx!ibmchs!auschs!sauer
From: sauer@auschs.UUCP (Charlie Sauer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt
Subject: Re: News-reading under AIX
Summary: standard news sources work with AIX
Message-ID: <49@auschs.UUCP>
Date: 15 Jul 88 15:37:37 GMT
References: <5984@spool.cs.wisc.edu>
Organization: IBM AES, Austin, TX
Lines: 45

In article <5984@spool.cs.wisc.edu>, luner@ai.cs.wisc.edu (David L. Luner) writes:
> I'm looking for code to run under AIX on an RT/PC to provide
> news reception (and forwarding). More than likely, the feed will be
> via UUCP, but network connections are also acceptable.

I've always run 2.10.3 level sources, being too lazy to upgrade to 2.11, but I
know of others running 2.11 on AIX, and I assume that 3.0 will work on AIX as
well.  I'm currently running AIX 2.2, but the binaries I'm using for news were
compiled on AIX 2.1.1.

The only difficulty I recall with getting news to run was with regard to 
uname(), actually in the utsname structure definition.  In 
/usr/include/sys/utsname.h, we have

#define  SYS_NMLN           32     /* Important: do not change this value ! */

struct utsname {
	char    sysname[SYS_NMLN];
	char    nodename[SYS_NMLN];
	char    release[SYS_NMLN];
	char    version[SYS_NMLN];
	char    machine[SYS_NMLN];
};

whereas the news sources assume that if you are using uname() then the sysname
field will be of length 9.  When we changed from 9 character to 32 character
nodenames we changed all of the fields to be of equal length, because that is
what the then current /usr/group standard (POSIX predecessor) required.
However, we retained an "ouname()" call which uses the traditional 9 character
fields.  So I changed the news sources to use ouname() instead of uname().

P.S.  /usr/include/sys/utsname.h also has the following:

#define  OLD_SYS_NMLN       9
struct outsname {
	char    sysname[OLD_SYS_NMLN];
	char    nodename[OLD_SYS_NMLN];
	char    release[OLD_SYS_NMLN];
	char    version[OLD_SYS_NMLN];
	char    machine[OLD_SYS_NMLN];
};
-- 
Charlie Sauer   IBM AES/ESD, D18/802     uucp: ut-sally!ut-emx!ibmaus!sauer
                11400 Burnet Road       csnet: ibmaus!sauer@EMX.UTEXAS.EDU
                Austin, Texas 78758    aesnet: sauer@auschs  
                (512) 823-3692           vnet: SAUER at AUSVM6