This directory contains files collected from various places throughout the system. They are intended as examples (taken from real life don't ya know) of how the files are intended to look. I've tried to update this file as I diddle with things. Hopefully any files which aren't listed in this file will enough documentation within themselves to help you figure out where they belong. Most of these files belong in the notesfile utility directory, /usr/spool/notes/.utilities. File What good is it -------- --------------------------- Read_me this file cronarch.sh shell file run "su" to the notesfile owner. This is run several times weekly to archive or delete old notes. cronnet.sh shell file run "su" to the notesfile owner. This is run occasionally (we are using 4 times daily) to propogate new notes for USENET notesfiles. In our situation, these notesfiles only see new traffic during the evening. By running this less frequently, we save a lot of cycles on our machines. cronlocal.sh shell file run "su" to the notesfile owner. This one propogates local notesfiles across the network. We separated the local updates from the USENET updates so we could update local notesfiles hourly and USENET notesfiles only a few times per day, centered around our polling other sites. This script is set up to talk to all of our local sites and gathers the set of notesfiles to send to each site from files, allowing easy changes to the list of notesfiles sent around without modifying the script itself. The same script is used on all of our hosts -- we just make sure that the list of notes to send to "yourself" is empty. crontab A copy of the added lines in /etc/crontab that we use for notes management. net.how /usr/spool/notes/.utilities/net.how - The file used by "nfxmit" to get updates to other systems. This is also used by "newsoutput" to figure out how to get to Usenet. newsgroups Our mappings between notesfiles and newsgroups. Lives in /usr/spool/notes/.utilities/newsgroups [not terribly up to date -RBE 3/84] shorten Shell script to clean up the log files. Run at your leisure. If you are hard up for disk space, run it often. syncnews C shell script provide by Brian Redman (harpo!ber) which compares notesfiles and newsgroups to see if any newsgroup does not have a matching notesfile. This script does not use the "newsgroups" file to alias between them. It is effective. sys A copy of /usr/lib/news/sys (for A news: /usr/spool/news/.sys) This shows how to get the news forwarded into notesfiles. Archive-into An example of the mapping file between active and archive notesfiles. I'm not using this feature too often, but this file gives you an idea of what is expected. The final resting place for this file is /usr/spool/notes/.utilities/net.aliases/Archive-into access-template This file contains modifications to the normal access list given to newly created notesfiles. It is handy to ensure that whoever manages the notesfile data base can access notesfiles from his own account in addition to the "notes" account. It can also be used to restrict access to new notesfiles. For more information on the format of this file, see the man page for nfaccess(8). avail.notes A copy of our "avail.notes" file. This describes the available notesfiles. This only contains the notesfiles that the administrator wishes to advertise. We list a number of our local notesfiles and then append the monthly USENET newsgroup listing. short.names This is a list of newsgroups which are longer than 14 characters. On non-4.2 BSD systems, a notesfile name is limited to 14 characters [4.2 gets to use 255]. If you have a 4.2 BSD system with long names and a neighbor with the short names, the following scenario can take place: you get news into "net.unix-wizards" and send it to your non-4.2 neighbor. He promptly truncates it to "net.unix-wizar". When the time comes for him to send back to you, it shows up on your machine in "net.unix-wizar". What we have done at UIUC is use symbolic links to make "net.unix-wizar" point at "net.unix-wizards". The short.names file allows us to send "net.*" and use the ! exclusion feature to remove references to the links such as "net.unix-wizar". The list is probably not quite in synch with the current USENET newsgroups. cron.csh Newest cron scripts for nfxmit execution. Accepts a single argument indicating the subdirectory of /usr/spool/notes/.utilities that has the files for each site with list of notesfiles to send. We use subdirectories "hourly", "daily", "6hours", etc. See the file "hourly.csh" for more info on this one.