Linux Network Administrator's Guide, Second Edition

Article Batching

News batches follow a particular format that is the same for B News, C News, and INN. Each article is preceded by a line like this:

#! rnews count

count is the number of bytes in the article. When you use batch compression, the resulting file is compressed as a whole and preceded by another line, indicated by the message to be used for unpacking. The standard compression tool is compress, which is marked by:

#! cunbatch

Sometimes, when the news server sends batches via mail software that removes the eighth bit from all data, a compressed batch may be protected using what is called c7-encoding; these batches will be marked by c7unbatch.

When a batch is fed to rnews on the remote site, it checks for these markers and processes the batch appropriately. Some sites also use other compression tools, like gzip, and precede their gzipped files with the word zunbatch instead. C News does not recognize nonstandard headers like these; you have to modify the source to support them.

In C News, article batching is performed by /usr/lib/news/batch/sendbatches, which takes a list of articles from the site/togo file and puts them into several newsbatches. It should be executed once per hour, or even more frequently, depending on the volume of traffic. Its operation is controlled by the batchparms file in /var/lib/news. This file describes the maximum batch size allowed for each site, the batching and optional compression program to be used, and the transport for delivering ...