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LharcUUCP — written by Peter Simons
Release 1 (December 23, 2024)
| 1 Copyright: | LharcUUCP version, copyright, disclaimer | |
| 2 What is it? | Why do you want to use this tool? | |
| 3 Installation: | ||
| 4 What uuxqt do I need? | ||
| 5 If you want to change the program: | ||
| 6 What LharcUUCP needs to work: | required hard- and software | |
| 7 How to contact me: | ||
| 8 Acknowledgments: |
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 2, June 1991
Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
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The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software–to make sure the software is free for all its users. This General Public License applies to most of the Free Software Foundation’s software and to any other program whose authors commit to using it. (Some other Free Software Foundation software is covered by the GNU Library General Public License instead.) You can apply it to your programs, too.
When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.
To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.
For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.
We protect your rights with two steps: (1) copyright the software, and (2) offer you this license which gives you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify the software.
Also, for each author’s protection and ours, we want to make certain that everyone understands that there is no warranty for this free software. If the software is modified by someone else and passed on, we want its recipients to know that what they have is not the original, so that any problems introduced by others will not reflect on the original authors’ reputations.
Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone’s free use or not licensed at all.
The precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and modification follow.
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Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.
You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.
These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program.
In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License.
The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.
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It is not the purpose of this section to induce you to infringe any patents or other property right claims or to contest validity of any such claims; this section has the sole purpose of protecting the integrity of the free software distribution system, which is implemented by public license practices. Many people have made generous contributions to the wide range of software distributed through that system in reliance on consistent application of that system; it is up to the author/donor to decide if he or she is willing to distribute software through any other system and a licensee cannot impose that choice.
This section is intended to make thoroughly clear what is believed to be a consequence of the rest of this License.
Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and "any later version", you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation.
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BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.
IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MAY MODIFY AND/OR REDISTRIBUTE THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
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LharcUUCP is a small tool to speed your uucico transfers up. uucico’s performance goes down, when you have to transfer plenty of small files, like e-mail and the corresponding description file. Larger files, however, are transferred at satisfying speed and efficiency—at least with a larger block size.
The idea is to batch all your e-mail and to transfer this large file rather than all of them separately. Additionally, this larger file can be crunched much better than the smaller ones. Ideas like this are available for several years now, namely BSMTP or RSMTP.
But these methods have one significant disadvantage: Once, the mails are batched, you can’t add any files anymore! This means, that you can’t run the batcher several times a day without having several smaller files again. And if you batch only a few times a day, you’re stuck with certain poll-times.
“So,” I thought, “why not use lharc or any similar archiver?” These archivers can crunch the data very well and they can still add files at a later time. Additionally, lzh-archives are understood on virtually every platform.
This is what LharcUUCP does! It scans your spool directory for queued jobs and archives them into one file using lharc. Currently, only mail- and news jobs are processed. Future versions might batch UUCP file transfers, too. Then an appropriate command- (‘X.system*’) and description file (‘D.systemX*’) is created—to tell uucico what to do with the archive.
In case, such an archive already exists when LharcUUCP is issued, it adds the new jobs to that archives, not creating a second file to transfer!
On the other side of the transfer, an uuxqt that recognizes the new
job-type rlharc is required.
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Copy ‘LharcUUCP’ and ‘rlharc’ somewhere into your command path, usually ‘UUCPC:’ or ‘UUCP:c/’. Please make sure that the rlharc script has its S-bit set or uuxqt won’t be able to start it! Additionally, you have to copy the ‘netsupport.library’ to your ‘LIBS:’ directory or LharcUUCP won’t work.
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LharcUUCP is installed and you’re ready to batch a few outgoing jobs. Send a testmail to someone and call LharcUUCP with the system the mail is spooled to as parameter, for example:
LharcUUCP dino
This will result in an output like this:
Processing queued jobs for >dino<. LharcUUCP: processing <C.dinoA0jsq> LhA m dino D.petiB0jss X.petiA0jsr LhA V1.50r - Copyright (c) 1991,92 Stefan Boberg. Registered to Peter Simons Creating new archive ’dino.lha’: Frozen: ( 43.7%) 553 => 311 : D.petiB0jss Frozen: ( 14.0%) 71 => 61 : X.petiA0jsr 2 files moved, all files OK. Operation successful.
and your ‘UUSpool:’ directory will contain three files, like these:
Directory of UUCP:Spool ——rwed 118 06-Dez-93 00:21:43 C.dinoA0000 ——rwed 47 06-Dez-93 00:21:43 D.dinoX0jsu ——rw-d 443 06-Dez-93 00:21:32 dino.lha 6 Blocks, 608 Bytes used in 3 files
Attention: Please take note, that this is just an example from my machine! Of course, the filenames, dates and sizes will vary on your site!
Okay, what happened here? LharcUUCP tries to ‘cd’ into the spool directory for the target system. It tries ‘UUSpool:<systemname>/’ first. If this fails, it looks for the same directory, but with the systemname truncated to 7 characters (1) and last but not least it just ‘cd’s into ‘UUSpool:’.
Now LharcUUCP scans for queued command files (‘C.<sysname>*’. If any files are found, LharcUUCP processes them and moves the result into an archive, named <systemname>.lha (2). Usually, this processing is done while uucico transfers the file. But now that uucico can’t access the single files anymore, we have to do it before the transfer. Actually, ‘processing’ means a simple renaming of the files.
Last but not least, LharcUUCP will create the command- and description files required by uucico.
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You should call LharcUUCP regularly, maybe using a cron, for all systems that poll you, eg.
00 19 * * * uucp:c/lharcuucp peti dino badtaste
to make sure that as many jobs as possible are moved into the archive.
Furthermore, you can configure LharcUUCP’s behavior by setting a local shell variable, a global enviroment variable or by adding the keyword to the main UUCP configfile (‘S:UUConfig’ or ‘UULIB:Config’). The following names are recognized:
This is the name of your UUCP site, eg. peti. Additionally, LharcUUCP will check for the global enviroment variable HOSTNAME to be set. If HOSTNAME is set, it has priority over the configfile.
Here you can specify the path of the command that is called to handle the incoming rlharc-packets. You’re uuxqt will check for a DOS- and an environment variable of the same name, before using this entry. Default is a plain ‘RLharc’, what should work in 99% of all cases.
Here you can specify the maximum size one single batch can become. Since uucico’s ‘g’ protocol can’t resume a packet after a carrier loss or something similar, too large batches will hurt your performance more than they’ll add, in case of instable telephone lines. I’d recommend a size of ~500 kilobyte (what is the default). ISDN connections, for example, may set this entry to ‘0’, disabling the batchsize limit.
You may use this entry to select which jobs shall be batched by LharcUUCP. The parsed parameter is exactly one character, defining the grade. Then, LharcUUCP will only batch jobs with a grade character lower (based on ASCII order) or equal to the one specified.
Newsbatches, for example, usually (should) have a grade of `N',
thus specifying
BatchOnlyGrade M
makes our LharcUUCP batch only jobs with grade characters ‘ ’ to ‘M’. The grade character is the one following the, possibly abbreviated, system name in command files (e. g. in ‘C.dinoB0815’ is ‘B’ the grade) (3). The default value is ’z’.
While ‘BatchOnlyGrade’ is global for any systems, you may specify a different grade for certain systems, appending the systemname to the keyword, for example:
BatchOnlyGrade_badtaste A
If the system-specific grade is invalid, the global entry is used.
Here you can set the grade, LharcUUCP’s job will have. It’s recommend to choose at least the same grade as e-mail, so the LharcUUCP job will be transferred pretty early. This has the advantage, that most of the e-mail included in the LharcUUCP job will be processed while uucico is still on-line and things like return-receipts or mailing lists will go out immediately. Default is ’A’.
ATTENTION: Never change the grade for LharcUUCP jobs while such a job is still queued or you’ll get into trouble. Make sure, all jobs are delivered. Usually, the default works perfectly, so you should know what you’re doing when you change this entry.
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Currently, I know at least two different uuxqts supporting the “rlharc”-type: The uuxqt included in wUUCP 0.0.19 (or later versions) and the uuxqt from Dillon UUCP 1.17. You shouldn’t have any problems when you’re using these babies.
For certain reasons you may want to use your own uuxqt. So what do you have to change in your version to make it understand LharcUUCP-batches?
All you have to do, is to add the “rlharc” type in the internal list of recognized job-types. Usually, you’ll find a block like this in any uuxqt:
if (strnicmp(ccmd, "rmail", 5) == 0) {
sprintf(cmd, "%s <%s %s", GetConfigProgram(RMAIL), dfile, ccmd_args);
}
else if (strnicmp(ccmd, "cunbatch", 5) == 0) {
sprintf(cmd, "%s <%s %s", GetConfigProgram(CUNBATCH), dfile, ccmd_args);
}
else if (strnicmp(ccmd, "rnews", 5) == 0) {
sprintf(cmd, "%s <%s", GetConfigProgram(RNEWS), dfile);
}
else if (strnicmp(ccmd, "frnews", 6) == 0) {
sprintf(cmd, "%s <%s", GetConfigProgram(RNEWS), dfile);
}
else if (strnicmp(ccmd, "rfnews", 6) == 0) {
sprintf(cmd, "%s <%s", GetConfigProgram(FRNEWS), dfile);
}
Now just add the following lines
else if (strnicmp(ccmd, "rlharc", 6) == 0) {
sprintf(cmd, "%s %s", GetConfigProgram("RLharc"), dfile);
}
and you’re done! That’s all! (4)
More sophisticated uuxqts support a parameter file, where you can easily add the ‘rlharc’ type without changing the code, but please refer to your documentation for more details.
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First of all: You’re welcome to add features to LharcUUCP, port it to other platforms and do whatever you consider useful, but you MUST redistribute the source, or at least the diffs, with the program or make it available for those who are interested.
Additionally, I’d be very happy to see a copy of your version, so I can add these features into the master revision tree.
I’d recommend the usage of RCS to keep the different versions under control, at least that’s what I am doing.
The Amiga version of LharcUUCP should be pretty easy to port to another system like UNIX or MS-DOS, I hope someone does this actually.
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Be careful, some uucico’s use the OwnDevUnit.Library to lock their files. If you happen to own such a version, you’ll need to author some scripts synchronizing the whole thing using LockSerial somehow.
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If you want to contact me (e-mail preferred), you may use the following addresses:
SnailMail: Peter Simons E-Mail: simons@peti.GUN.de (Usenet)
Europaring 20
53123 Bonn Voice: +49 228 746061
Germany
Additionally, there exists an LharcUUCP mailing lists for bug reports, questions, enhancement requests and discussion. You can post to the list by sending e-mail to <LharcUUCP@peti.GUN.de> and subscribe by sending e-mail to <listserv@peti.GUN.de>, featuring the following lines in the message body:
ADD your_address LharcUUCP HELP
and a few hours later you’ll be subscribed to the list. Please take note that you should always receive an answer from the daemon.
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Thanks a lot to Frank Bergknecht and Stefan Thielscher for taking the risk of beta testing this program. :-)
Furthermore, I’d like to express my appreciation for Kai ’wusel’ Siering, who added immediate support in his uuxqt, provided his wUUCP sources and spent a fair amount of time, answering my phone calls. :-)
Additionally, thanks a lot to Judith, one of the most beautiful girls I’ve ever known, for beeing such a kind person and for having so much understanding for my time-consuming hobby. (Although she’ll never read this, I suppose.)
My final greetings for general support and beeing all-time good friends go to {Thomas|Walter} Mildenberger, Mark Constable, Mike Meyer, Michael B. Smith and Shaquille O’Neal.
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This was common with older versions of wUUCP.
The archive postfix may vary on other platforms. *.lzh is pretty common, too.
Refer to the uux man page for further information.
Please pay attention to the fact that rlharc gets the name of the file as parameter! It doesn’t use standard input like most other programs, rmail or rnews for example. If you want rlharc to receive the archive-data via pipe/stdin, you’ll have to change the ‘rlharc’ script that unpacks the archive.
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