Problem with notesfile/netnews inter - (nf)

[spotter at tekcad.UUCP]

#R:enea:-18400:tekcad:2700001:000:2218
tekcad!spotter    Dec 13 10:05:00 1983

	>I've a problem with the notefile system when it submits
	>articles from notesfile to netnews with the routine newsoutput.
	>The author is always set to "notes" (owner of notesfile)
	>instead of the original author as it should, using B-news (2.10.1).
	>Has anyone a fix for this?

     Without DEMANDNEWS, when cron fires up the "su notesmo-
derator  <  cronrun", the notes for the day get sent out BUT
they get sent out with a PATH and a  SENDER  that  list  the
"real"  user  -  notesmoderator.  Then when someone responds
through   mail   from   news,   the   response    goes    to
notesmoderator.The only way to avoid this is to use your own
inews that is allowed to believe the -f flag. I don't really
think  that's  a very good idea, since it would allow anyone
to send mail and pretend that it's from someone else.

     With DEMANDNEWS, notes sends out each note as  it  gets
it - or at least that's the theory. What actually happens is
that any note that has been posted since the last dump -  OR
AT THE SAME TIME AS THE LAST DUMP - is sent out.  This means
that if the news dump takes less than a minute  (that's  the
resolution  notes stores) then the note will go out again on
the next dump.  It can't be fixed by insisting that the time
of  the note be > the dump time because then if a user posts
2 notes in a minute the second one will not go out. The  fix
I  have  implemented (and it seems to work) is to change the
resolution on times to 1 sec.

Another problem: bnewsinput hangs on some mal-formed inputs.

When given input that could be garbage you should never have things like:
		while ((c = getc(rawnews)) != '\n');
I changed them all to things like:
		while (((c = getc(rawnews)) != '\n') && (c != EOF));
		if (c == EOF)
		    goto toobad;

Also, it looks like bnewsinput is looking for the date of notes/replies
generated by the notes system wrong. The lines read:
		i = 0;
		while ((line[i] = getc(rawnews)) != '\n');
							/* grab date */
and should read:
		i = 0;
		while (((line[i++] = c = getc(rawnews)) != '\n') && (c != EOF));
			       ^^		/* grab date */
		if (c == EOF)
		    goto toobad;
This occurs in two places.

All these changes are available as ...!tekcad!~uucp/notes.tar

-- 


				Steve Potter

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