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