>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> No software in the NNTP 1.4 package >> NOTE NOTE NOTE NOTE >> uses the NEWGROUPS command. As a result, >> NOTE NOTE NOTE NOTE >> mkgrdates is no longer supported, but is >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> included for completeness. Mkgrdates is run by cron periodically (say, every 6 or 12 hours -- it's up to you). All it does is produce a cronologically ordered list of newsgroups in the active file, along with their dates of creation. It tries to be intelligent, and if the active file hasn't changed since it was last run, it simply exits. So, you'll need to put "mkgrdates" in /usr/lib/crontab to be run periodically. Every day is probably good enough. Some things you might want to be aware of are that it creates and updates the files STAT_FILE and NGDATE_FILE, defined in ../common/conf.h. It's up to you to define these constants to suit your system. The file "access_file" is the file which tells the news server which hosts can read, which can post, and which can transfer. This file wants to be installed wherever ACCESS_FILE in ../common/conf.h says it should be (you can configure this to suit you). Remember that this should be readable by whatever uid the news server runs as. Further, remember that the entry "default" must be first in the table. >>> The access file will support subnets iff you have <<< >>> defined SUBNET when you made the server. <<< Finally, edit Makefile to reflect DESTDIR -- where you want the binary to be installed for mkgrdates. If you're having the nntp server log copious info, you will probably want to run the stat package developed by Erik Fair. Once a week you should have crontab do awk -f nntp_awk nntplog.old >& nntp_report where "nntplog.old" is the last week's nntp log file produced by syslog. Any errors which it cannot resolve are placed in the front of the report.