If this all doesn't work right (despite my explanations), you have
different possibilities to find the mistakes and fix them. An
important tool for doing this is ifstat, which reports which
packets are on hold for which addresses. Don't get confused, if these
packets shrink after starting ifpoll, because this packs the
mails into ZIP-Files.
It would be a good idea to raise the debug-level of rfc2ftn in
/etc/smail/transports resp. in /etc/sendmail.cf. To
do this just add the parameter -v in ytt/rfc2ftn/ (you can use
more than one v to raise the debug-level, e.g. I use something
like -vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv). To really get hold of the
debug-messages I send the mail with a copy to a non-existent address so
that I get the returned message with all the debug output. If such a
returned message doesn't arrive it's quite possible that some of the
permissions aren't correct which causes the system to wait (the still
running processes sendmail and rfc2ftn indicate this). Then
you find the latest debug-file in /var/spool/smail/msglog.
In the directory /var/spool/smail you find the "stranded"
messages. Using sendmail the log-messages are written via syslog into
the syslogfile and the "stranded" messages lie in
/var/spool/mqueue.
The fix to this problem is similiar to the one we discussed already
for the mail. I build in /usr/lib/newsbin/batch/viafido
(cnews) resp. in /usr/local/lib/news/send-fidogate (INN) some
-v's and append a 2>/tmp/fgate.out in the apt line,
which causes that the output of stderr is written to
/tmp/fgate.out, which one can look at and search for the
problem.
Another good idea is to look at
/var/spool/news/out.going/*/togo between calling newsrun and
run-batch if the article was listed and deleted afterwards. Sometimes
(depending on the version of cnews) the articles are saved to
/var/spool/news/in.coming.
INN should take the article immediately into the newssystem thus they
should appear in the file /var/spool/news/out.going/*. After
running send-fidogate they should disappear there and you should
find them in the Fido-outbound.
Furthermore one should have a look at all the logiles:
/var/spool/smail/log/logfile
/var/log/mail
/var/lib/news/log.*
/var/lib/news/batchlog.*
/var/lib/news/errlog.*
/usr/local/lib/news/log
/usr/local/lib/news/errlog
/var/log/inn/*
/var/log/fnet/log
/var/log/fnet/ifmail
/var/log/fnet/iflog
/var/log/fnet/ifdebug
To verify the created packets or fix problems in already existing
packets FidoGate comes along with the program pktdebug. If you
need more information you should get hold of the DOS-program Inspect
which runs perfectly in the DOSEmu. When you allow dosemu to access
the apt directories and start DOSEmu as user uucp you can even
change the .pkt-files and archives.
If cnews completly hangs up, you have to debug the various
cnews-shell-scripts. To do this just add a "set -xv" in the
beginning of the script which then reports which line of the script is
called with which parameters. For further information have a look at
the manpages of the bash.
In the case only the posting of news-articles doesn't work try to post
with Pnews from the trn-package directly. In contrast to
tin this is only a simple shell-script which alway waits until you've
read the error-messages of cnews (tin overwrites them with a
menu).