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 preceeding shutdown, emails 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"), and therefore requires that inndstart be setuid root, see inndstart(8) for discussion.

Programs run and stopped by this script include:

•   Always: inndstart is run, and innd is stopped.

•   If doinnwatch is true in inn.conf: innwatch is started and stopped.

•   If docnfsstat is true 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).

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. It is recommended to throttle the server first as described in ctlinnd(8).

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

       su - news -c ~news/bin/rc.news

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

       su - news -c ~news/bin/rc.news >/dev/console

To stop INN (throttling first):

       ~news/bin/ctlinnd throttle reason
       su - news -c '~news/bin/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.8,v 1.1 2002/12/03 05:31:11 vinocur Exp $

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