RC.NEWS(8)

💅 RC.NEWS(8) — the group-chat guide

okay so bestie, this is rc.news, from the InterNetNews documentation set (manual page RC.NEWS(8), if you're keeping track). It's the little script that starts and stops your INN daemons, and honestly? It's giving responsible older sister. Let's get into it 🎀

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✨ NAME ✨

rc.news — start or stop INN daemons, no cap 🦋

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

rc.news ["start" | "stop"]

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👑 DESCRIPTION 👑

rc.news is literally your one-stop glow-up for starting or stopping innd and all its supporting programs. It checks that INN isn't already running (no double-starting, we don't do that here 💀), handles cases of unclean shutdown, finishes up tasks that might have been interrupted by the preceding shutdown, e-mails certain boot-time warnings to newsmaster (as set in inn.conf), and is generally safer and easier than starting and stopping everything directly. Iconic behaviour, honestly.

🫶 It needs to be run as the news user so that files in pathrun are created with the right ownership — though this is less important for rc.news stop.

Here's everything this script runs and stops, so you know exactly what's happening behind the scenes:

• Always: innd is started or stopped. Always. Non-negotiable. 👑
• If doinnwatch is true in inn.conf: innwatch is started and stopped.
• If docnfsstat is true in inn.conf: cnfsstat is started and stopped.
• If ovmethod is set to "ovdb" in inn.conf: ovdb_init is run; ovdb_server and ovdb_monitor are stopped.
• If ovmethod is set to "ovsqlite" in inn.conf: ovsqlite-server is started and stopped.
• If rc.news.local exists in pathbin: rc.news.local is run with argument "start" or "stop" (to perform site-specific startup or shutdown tasks — go off, local customisation 💖).
• When started, if INN appears to have previously been shut down during its expiry process, run expirerm if there are articles to unlink.
• When started, if overview data appears to have just been rebuilt and active needs to be renumbered, then actually renumber it.

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🔥 OPTIONS 🔥

• "start" — if the first argument is "start", or no first argument is given at all (default queen behaviour ✨), rc.news initiates INN startup.
• "stop" — if the first argument is "stop", rc.news initiates INN shutdown. Bye bestie 👋

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⭐ EXAMPLES ⭐

Wanna start INN and leave certain error messages going to the terminal? Say less:

su news -s /bin/sh -c <pathbin in inn.conf>/rc.news

Wanna run INN at startup time from appropriate system boot scripts? Very main character of you:

su news -s /bin/sh -c <pathbin>/rc.news >> <pathlog>/rc.news 2>&1

Wanna stop INN? Simple as:

su news -s /bin/sh -c '<pathbin>/rc.news stop'

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🦋 HISTORY 🦋

This manual page was written by Jeffrey M. Vinocur <jeff@litech.org> for InterNetNews. Respect the author, fr fr 🙏

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

ctlinnd(8), cnfsstat(8), expirerm(8), inn.conf(5), innwatch(8), ovdb(5), ovsqlite(5). Go read those next, iykyk 💜

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That's the whole page, bestie — brought to you by INN 2.7.4, dated 2022-07-10, and lovingly resold to you with way more emoji than the original author ever intended 😭💅