Ubuntu Manpage: fetchnews - fetch news via NNTP

NAME

       fetchnews - fetch news via NNTP

SYNOPSIS

       fetchnews [-q] [-v] ... [-x number] [-l] [-n] [-f] [-P] [-w]

DESCRIPTION

       Leafnode  is  a  USENET  package  intended  for small sites, where there are few users and
       little disk space, but where a large number of groups is desired.

       The design of leafnode is intended to self-repair after problems, and to require no manual
       maintenance.

       Fetchnews  (formerly  called  "fetch")  is  the  program  which  submits and retrieves new
       articles to or from the upstream NNTP server.

OPTIONS

-q Be quiet. Suppresses some warnings. This flag cancels any previously encountered -v
flags.

-v Be verbose. This flag cancels any previously encountered -q flags. A maximum of
four -v can be used (the more v, the more verbose):

-v Warn about non-critical errors.

-vv Be verbose whenever a group command occurs.

-vvv Be verbose whenever an article command occurs.

-vvvv For debugging purposes. Don't expect the additional output to make sense.

-w Wait mode. This causes the XOVER update (which runs after the article fetch phase)
to run in the foreground. By default, the XOVER update runs in the background,
detached from the shell, on systems that offer a working fork(2) call. Helpful for
debugging and to avoid terminal clobbering when fetchnews is run manually.

-x number
Go number articles back and try to re-fetch what's missing. This can be useful to
pull data from broken servers that have either overview and group data out of synch
or create articles out of article number order.

-l Don't use supplementary servers (-l is supposed to mean "local"). This does speed
up the operation quite a bit.

-n Do not expire newsgroup subscriptions. Technically: do not unlink files in the
interesting.groups directory.

-f Erase the active.read file, thus force redownloading the whole active file from all
upstream servers. This is usually occurring only very infrequently because it takes
a long time. See timeout_active in leafnode(8). DO NOT use this option in cron
jobs or otherwise regularly.

-P Only post articles that have accumulated in the out.going directory but do not
fetch articles from upstream servers.

EXIT STATUS

       fetchnews  will  exit  with  code  0 if it could connect to all servers and encountered no
       other errors. It exits with code 2 when it was unable to connect to at least  one  server,
       and it exits with code 1 on other errors.

FILES AND CONFIGURATION

       /var/spool/news/leaf.node/active.read
              is a file to track when the active files have been successfully downloaded from the
              upstream servers the last time. If it is missing,  this  has  the  same  effect  as
              giving  the  -f  option.  It is only created after the active file of each upstream
              servers has been downloaded successfully.

       See leafnode(8) for the list of other files affected, and for information  on  configuring
       fetchnews.

ENVIRONMENT

       LN_SKIP_GROUPS=pattern[,pattern[...]] (since v1.9.53)
              If set, all groups that match one of the wildmat(3) patterns will be skipped during
              the fetch. This can be used as  a  quick  way  of  skipping  binary  groups  during
              daytime, for instance, example:

              env 'LN_SKIP_GROUPS=*binary*,alt.*' /usr/sbin/fetchnews -nq

       LN_LOCK_TIMEOUT
              This  variable  is  parsed  as  an  unsigned  integer value and determines how many
              seconds fetchnews will wait when trying  to  obtain  the  lock  file  from  another
              leafnode program. 0 means to wait indefinitely. This variable takes precedence over
              the configuration file.

       LN_SUPPRESS_DATE
              (since v1.11.7) If this variable is defined (regardless  of  its  value,  including
              empty), leafnode will skip checking the upstream server's time by means of the NNTP
              DATE command.

ALGORITHM

Here is a brief description of what fetchnews does.

First, after connecting to the upstream NNTP server, all articles that have the u+r
permission (0400) flag set in /var/spool/news/out.going are posted using POST. If a
posting fails, that article is moved to /var/spool/news/failed.postings which an
administrator has to clean up once in a while. Moving a file back to
/var/spool/news/out.going is sufficient to retry the post it. The u+r flag is checked to
prevent posting an (incomplete) article that leafnode(8) is still receiving at the same
time. If a posting succeeds, the article is removed from out.going in order to not post
it twice into a moderated newsgroup on a different server (which would send multiple
copies of the article to the moderator). Note: older fetchnews versions tried to post on
all servers first, but failed to do so when one of the servers could not be reached. If
you need to work around a dodgy upstream server that is fast but doesn't forward your
posts reliably, prohibit posting to this server using the nopost server option in the
configuration file, see leafnode(8).

Second, the upstream server's list of newsgroups (obtained using LIST and LIST NEWSGROUPS)
is merged into leafnode's (if timeout_active has expired, the active.read file is not
present or the active file is empty) or updated (with NEWGROUPS).

Third, fetchnews iterates over the list of newsgroups, performing a GROUP, an XOVER (if
supported) or XHDR Message-ID and a number of HEAD and BODY or ARTICLE commands for each
group which has been read recently. It assumes that for the particular group it is looking
at, "maxage" was set to the groupexpire or global expire. As a consequence, it makes only
sense to set maxage lower than or equal to expire.

NOTES

       Fetchnews does not use NEWNEWS.  NEWNEWS is not used because it is  often  very  expensive
       and therefore also disabled at many sites.

       After  some experiments, I decided that it was better to fetch all the articles in a group
       than to optimize away some; users would complain too  loudly  when  the  optmizer  guessed
       wrongly.

       The  only  way to control what newsgroups are accessible to local users is to control what
       the upstream server lets fetchnews read,  and  that  will  not  keep  out  all  crossposts
       (endemic in e.g. the alt.sex groups).  If your site is big enough that you need to control
       newsgroup access, consider using a news server which is designed for a big site.

       Fetchnews sets its real and effective uid to "news" when started as root  and  refuses  to
       run if it cannot get this user ID.

BUGS

       Fetchnews ignores the "Supersedes:" and "Control:" headers.

HISTORY

       Older  versions  of  fetchnews  posted  any  articles  found  in out.going. Since v1.9.23,
       fetchnews will only post article files that have their user executable bit set.   Leafnode
       sets  this  bit  after  it has successfully received a post. This behaviour avoids posting
       incomplete articles when leafnode receives a post at the same time fetchnews is posting.

AUTHOR

       Written by Arnt Gulbrandsen <agulbra@troll.no> and copyright 1995\-–\-96  Troll  Tech  AS,
       Postboks 6133 Etterstad, 0602 Oslo, Norway, fax +47 22646949.

       Modified  by  Cornelius  Krasel  <krasel@wpxx02.toxi.uni-wuerzburg.de>, Markus Enzenberger
       <enz@cip.physik.uni-muenchen.de> and Randolf Skerka <Randolf.Skerka@gmx.de>.  Copyright of
       the  modifications  1997\-–\-1999.   Modified by Matthias Andree <matthias.andree@gmx.de>,
       copyright of the modifications 2001\-–\-2004.