Linux Network Administrator's Guide, Second Edition

Miscellaneous Files

There are a number of files that control the behavior of C News, but are not essential. All of them reside in /etc/news. We describe them briefly here:

newsgroups

This is a companion file of active that contains a list of each newsgroup name along with a one-line description of its main topic. This file is automatically updated when C News receives a checknews control message.

localgroups

If you have a lot of local groups, you can keep C News from complaining about them each time you receive a checkgroups message by putting their names and descriptions in this file, just as they would appear in newsgroups.

mailpaths

This file contains the moderator’s address for each moderated group. Each line contains the group name followed by the moderator’s email address (offset by a tab).

Two special entries are provided as defaults: backbone and internet. Both provide, in bang-path notation, the path to the nearest backbone site and the site that understands RFC-822 style addresses (user@host). The default entries are:

internet           backbone

You do not have to change the internet entry if you have exim or sendmail installed; they understand RFC-822 addressing.

The backbone entry is used whenever a user posts to a moderated group whose moderator is not listed explicitly. If the newsgroup’s name is alt.sewer and the backbone entry contains path!%s, C News will mail the article to path!alt-sewer, hoping that the backbone machine is able to forward the article. To find out ...