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17. Troubleshooting

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.

17.1 Mail is not processed

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.

17.2 News are not processed

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:

smail

/var/spool/smail/log/logfile

Sendmail

/var/log/mail

cnews

/var/lib/news/log.* /var/lib/news/batchlog.* /var/lib/news/errlog.*

INN

/usr/local/lib/news/log /usr/local/lib/news/errlog /var/log/inn/*

fidogate

/var/log/fnet/log

ifcico

/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).


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