Problem with C news under ISC 1.0.6 with history file size

[Richard Todd]

gary at sci34hub.sci.com (Gary Heston) writes:

>I've run into a problem the last couple of days. C news is tossing every
>batch with a "unable to write history file" error (in errlog). My first
>guess at the reason is the good 'ole ulimit--history is now 8388608 bytes
>in size. 
...
>I'd really rather not have C news running as root; while it's fine 
>software, it shouldn't be necessary to do that because of an OS 
>shortcoming. I have, in the past, conducted a couple of extensive 
>searches for upping ulimits' default, without success (we have
>a system in another plant with the same problem, with a large database).

Hmm.  There's a good chance that one little piece of C News on your system
is *already* running as root -- the setnewsids program, which is used for
setting euids and such correctly for the benefit of relaynews, and is 
definitely needed on some SysV systems.  setnewsids is a "wrapper" that
relaynews executes when it finds it has the wrong permissions, and after
things get set right, re-execs relaynews.  Since setnewsids runs setuid-root,
you can stick the ulimit() in there; I seem to recall someone else with
a SysV with stupidly low, non-configurable default ulimit mentioning that 
he did this.  You might try this.  
--
Richard Todd	rmtodd at uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu  rmtodd at chinet.chi.il.us
	rmtodd at servalan.uucp
"Elvis has left Bettendorf!"