Be sure to read the "RKT couplings" below for additional information and updates to this entry.
| Subject: (4.16) Cookbook example of an outgoing UUCP-over-TCP feed: |
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Jerry Aguirre <jerry@strobe.ATC.Olivetti.Com> writes: People ask about this like it was something exotic requiring special setup. Kind of like: "I know how to use a wheel barrow and I know how to shovel sand but how do I shovel sand in a wheel barrow?" Step 1: Set up a UUCP/TCP connection between you and the destination site. How? Read your UUCP documentation. If your machine's UUCP, and the destination machine's UUCP both supports UUCP/TCP then it will be documented. If not then get a better version of UUCP. For example, Taylor UUCP. Every OS sets up UUCP differently: YOU HAVE TO READ THE DOCUMENTATION. The point is to get the UUCP/TCP link working before even thinking about sending news over it. This is true of any news feed over UUCP; even dialup. Try using "uucp" to copy some scratch file to the other end. When you have that working then you are ready for the next step. The only "gotcha" here that I can think of is that the destination host may not be accepting UUCP/TCP connections. Before wasting your time trying to debug do a "telnet destination.host.name uucp" and see what happens. If the connection is accepted and you see a "login" banner then it is ready for you. If not then ask the admin of that site to enable UUCP/TCP. This is typically done by uncommenting it in /etc/inetd.conf and -HUPing inetd (on REAL versions of Unix). Step 2. Set up a standard compressed news feed to the UUCP name of the destination site. How? Read your news documentation. Setting up UUCP feeds is a standard, documented, procedure. In this FAQ you'll find it in "Cookbook example of an outgoing UUCP feed". Doing compression is nothing special, it's part of the procedure you would be doing anyway. It's either a flag or a slightly different command. The news system has NO knowledge that this is UUCP/TCP. For all it knows this is a standard dialup connection. In fact is is possible to have the UUCP connection fall back to dialup if the TCP connection fails. The news batching software just doesn't care. The only variation here I can think of is to make the batch size bigger than the default. The 50K default was picked back in the days when modems were 1200 BPS (or even 300). It is no longer appropriate for today's 9600 BPS or faster connections. Using a bigger batch size cuts down on dead time in the connection and lets compress do a better job. I would go to at least 200K batches. Now maybe it would be nice to have a "cookbook", step by step, set of instructions on how to do this. But UUCP seems to vary a bit between different versions so what might work at one place would be useless at another. And setting up the news feed is going to be different between the different versions of news (B, C, and INN). I suggest that if people are having trouble setting up a UUCP/TCP connection that they post their configuration to the net and ask how it is done on their versions of Unix and UUCP. ------------------------------ [Last Changed: $Date: 1997/08/26 01:26:21 $ $Revision: 2.19 $] [Copyright: 1997 Heiko Rupp, portions by Tom Limoncelli, Rich Salz, et al.] |
