Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!xanth!mcnc!decvax!decwrl!hplabs!hp-sdd!ncr-sd!ncrlnk!uunet!bywater!acheron!clarke
From: clarke@acheron.UUCP (Ed Clarke)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: news.sysadmin
Message-ID: <289@acheron.UUCP>
Date: 4 Dec 88 15:58:39 GMT
References: <501@alice.marlow.uucp>
Lines: 35

From article <501@alice.marlow.uucp>, by fox@marlow.uucp (Paul Fox):
[stuff deleted]

> them permission to access (tell me how I can stop it), or
> they are executing a shell script on my system I have not given
> them permission to. Either way it is WRONG.
> 

Not quite true, you're mistaken about what is happening.  The 'owner' of
some series of newsgroups ( i.e. bionet.xxxxx ) sends out a posting to
the 'control' group.  In the example that I'm looking at, Eliot Lear
( lear@NET.BIO.NET ) has sent out a message to the bionet.molbio.ctl
group containing the lines:

Control: checkgroups
Distribution: bionet

in the header.  The remainder of the message is a list of official bionet 
newsgroups.  The purpose of this message is to notify everyone about
new groups that may have been added ( and missed at your site ), and
about groups that may now be obsolete.  'inews' sees the control message
and executes the 'checkgroups' shell script that comes with news 11.14b.
This seems to be failing for some reason at your site.

You might try renaming the 'checkgroups' script to something else and
having your upstream site send you a checkgroups message.  If that fails,
try having a 'checkgroups' script that does nothing - just exits.

[ Note: it's not merely 'bionet' that sends out these messages.  I think
  that backbone sites send out 'comp' checkgroups, also 'gnu' etc.  The
  sender is usually just doing her/his job and not simply trying to be
  a pain. ]
-- 
Ed Clarke
uunet!bywater!acheron!clarke