Advanced Usenet Hi-jinks ------------------------- To specifically cancel someone else's article, you need its message-ID. Your message headers, in addition to what's already there, should also contain the following with that message-ID in it. This makes it a "control message". NOTE: control messages generally require an Approved: header as well, so you should add one. Subject: cmsg cancel Control: cancel Approved: luser@twits.site.com Newsgroups are created and destroyed with control messages, too. If you wanted to create, for instance, comp.misc.microsoft.sucks, your control headers would look like Subject: cmsg newgroup comp.misc.microsoft.sucks Control: newgroup comp.misc.microsoft.sucks Add on the string "moderated" at the end of these if you want the group to be "moderated with no moderator" as with alt.hackers. Somewhere in the body of your message, you should include the following text, changed with the description of the group you're creating: For your newsgroups file: comp.misc.microsoft.sucks We don't do windows To remove a group, substitute "rmgroup" for "newgroup" in the header lines above. Keep in mind that most sites run all "rmgroup" requests through a human news-master, who may or may not decide to honor it. Group creation is more likely to be automatic than deletion at most installations. Any newsgroup changes are more likely to take effect if the come from me, since my name is hardwired into many of the NNTP control scripts, so using the From: and Approved: headers from this posting is recommended. Save your changed article, check it to make sure it contains NO reference to yourself or your own site, and send it to your favourite NNTP server that permits transfers via the IHAVE command, using the following script: ======================= #! /bin/sh ## Post an article via IHAVE. ## args: filename server if test "$2" = "" ; then echo usage: $0 filename server exit 1 fi if test ! -f $1 ; then echo $1: not found exit 1 fi # suck msg-id out of headers, keep the brackets msgid=`sed -e '/^$/,$d' $1 | egrep '^[Mm]essage-[Ii][Dd]: ' | \ sed 's/.*-[Ii][Dd]: //'` echo $msgid ( sleep 5 echo IHAVE $msgid sleep 5 cat $1 sleep 1 echo "." sleep 1 echo QUIT ) | telnet $2 119 ======================= If your article doesn't appear in a day or two, try a different server. They are easy to find. Here's a script that will break a large file full of saved netnews into a list of hosts to try. Edit the output of this if you want, to remove obvious peoples' names and other trash. ======================= #! /bin/sh FGV='fgrep -i -v' egrep '^Path: ' $1 | sed -e 's/^Path: //' -e 's/!/\ /g' | sort -u | fgrep . | $FGV .bitnet | $FGV .uucp ======================= Once you have your host list, feed it to the following script. ======================= #! /bin/sh while read xx ; do if test "$xx" = "" ; then continue; fi echo === $xx ( echo open $xx 119 sleep 5 echo ihave IamSOk00l@podunk.edu sleep 4 echo . echo quit sleep 1 echo quit ) | telnet done ======================= If the above script is called "findem" and you're using csh, you should do findem < list >& outfile so that ALL output from telnet is captured. This takes a long time, but when it finishes, edit "outfile" and look for occurrences of "335". These mark answers from servers that might be willing to accept an article. This isn't a completely reliable indication, since some servers respond with acceptance and later drop articles. Try a given server with a slightly modified repeat of someone else's message, and see if it eventually appears. Sometimes the telnets get into an odd state, and freeze, particularly when a host is refusing NNTP connections. If you manually kill these hung telnet processes but not the main script, the script will continue on. In other words, you may have to monitor the finding script a little while it is running. You will notice other servers that don't necessarily take an IHAVE, but say "posting ok". You can probably do regular POSTS through these, but they will add an "NNTP-Posting-Host: " header containing the machine YOU came from and are therefore unsuitable for completely anonymous use.