From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2013 14:24:44 +0100 From: 9fans@mail2news.bath.ac.uk To: 9fans@9fans.net Message-ID: User-Agent: Alpine 2.10 (BSO 1266 2009-07-14) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Subject: [9fans] Moderator's Note: comp.os.plan9 Newsgroup. Topicbox-Message-UUID: 6bef77c4-ead8-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 The comp.os.plan9 Usenet Newsgroup is a moderated Newsgroup. Articles require approval before being posted. It has been moderated from here, the University of Bath, since the 1990's. I, the current moderator, will be leaving the University at the end of this month and our Usenet server will be turned off in late August of this year. So a new moderator for comp.os.plan9 is required. Newsgroup articles are also sent to the 9fans mailing list. Messages sent to the 9fans mailing list are auto-injected into the comp.os.plan9 Usenet Newsgroup. This bi-directional gateway will disappear when our Usenet server is turned off. So a volunteer to take over this service is also required. Further details of the above are given below. Moderating the Newsgroup isn't labour-intensive. For example I've approved and posted some 18 articles in the last three months. The vast majority of these articles have arrived via Google Groups. The moderator will need access to a Usenet system and have the right to post articles to a moderated Newsgroup. I.e. articles from the moderator which include an Approved: header are accepted. Volunteer moderators are requested. I suspect the reason that moderating the Newsgroup isn't arduous is that the majority of the articles in the comp.os.plan9 Newsgroup are gatewayed in from the 9fans mailing list at: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/mailing_lists/ and most serious plan9 adherents are members of this mailing list. Currently our Usenet server acts as a bi-directional gateway. The articles from the 9fans mailing list are injected into the comp.os.plan9 Newsgroup and articles approved for the Newsgroup are sent on to the mailing list. Gatewaying the 9fans mailing list into the Newsgroup will obviously keep running until our Usenet server is switched off, but a replacement elsewhere is ideally required. The minimum requirement for gatewaying mailing list articles into the Newsgroup is to be subscribed to the 9fans mailing list and have access to a Usenet system with the right to post articles to a moderated Newsgroup. Manually injecting 9fans mailing list articles into the Newsgroup is labour-intensive. It needs to be automated. There are probably several ways of doing this, but we've set this up directly on our Usenet server. Our setup is similar to the following. We use the mail domain mail2news.bath.ac.uk for mailing lists we wish to inject into Newsgroups. Mail for this domain is handled by the Usenet server, which is running exim as its MTA and INN as its Usenet software. All incoming email is checked for viruses using ClamAV. An address in the mail2news.bath.ac.uk domain is subscribed to the 9fans mailing list. Email arriving for this address is checked to see it has the correct envelope sender (9fans-bounces@9fans.net). If so, the INN program "mailpost" is used to inject the message into the Newsgroup. The "mailpost" program keeps a record of the Message-ID's it has seen. So there's no problem with looping, ie the attempted injection of the same message a repeated number of times. Newsgroup articles could be injected into the mailing list by using INN "news2mail" channel script. However, betraying my original Cnews roots, this is done by a shell script driven by the fragment: # Inject articles posted to the comp.os.plan9 Newsgroup back into # the mailing list, 9fans@9fans.net, using a locally written script. # The script should include safeguards against looping, ie not # re-injecting articles that originally came from the mailing list. plan9mail!\ :comp.os.plan9\ :Tp:/opt/news/bin/plan9mail %s in INN's newsfeeds file. The above script uses the news2mail program from the antique but usable newsgate.tar.Z package to send email. The anti-looping checks include ensuring the Newsgroup article doesn't include a header of the form: X-BeenThere: 9fans@9fans.net which indicates this was a 9fans mailing list article injected into Newsgroup. The above may sound complex, but it's fairly maintenance free once set up. We clearly won't be able to continue with this service once our Usenet server is decommissioned. A volunteer to set up and run a similar service is required. -- Dennis Davis, BUCS, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK D.H.Davis@bath.ac.uk Phone: +44 1225 386101