RC.NEWS(8)

NAME
rc.news - Start or stop INN daemons

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

DESCRIPTION
rc.news can be used to start or stop innd and supporting programs. It checks to make sure INN is not already running, handles cases of unclean shutdown, finishes up tasks which 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. 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").

Programs run and stopped by this script include:

•   Always: innd is started or stopped.

•   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 rc.news.local exists in pathbin: rc.news.local is run with argument "start" or "stop" (to perform site-specific startup or shutdown tasks).

•   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.

OPTIONS

"start"
    If the first argument is "start", or no first argument is given, rc.news initiates INN startup.

"stop"
    If the first argument is "stop", rc.news initiates INN shutdown.

EXAMPLES
To start INN and leave certain error messages going to the terminal:

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

To run INN at startup time from appropriate system boot scripts:

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

To stop INN:

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

BUGS
Running "rc.news start" as root is never the right thing to do, so we should at minimum check for this and error, or perhaps change effective user ID.

HISTORY
// FIXME: any attribution for rc.news itself?

This manual page written by Jeffrey M. Vinocur <jeff@litech.org> for InterNetNews.

$Id: rc.news.pod 9723 2014-09-24 17:54:24Z iulius $

SEE ALSO
ctlinnd(8), cnfsstat(8), expirerm(8), inn.conf(5), innwatch(8), ovdb(5).