Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Ethan Carter Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: a question on the nncp workflow Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2025 21:50:35 -0300 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 198 Message-ID: <87a58m19us.fsf@somewhere.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Injection-Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2025 02:53:00 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="10dd8ecb5dad57e6de1858cebc8ce48e"; logging-data="3204866"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+bywiUWj9J8mJ1XTm1xI7prRh+eU/Zs00=" Cancel-Lock: sha1:BErbvwhXxyc6e/dF1gR1euvcYNc= sha1:SlvNwZ6P2TaXCIuVEAGj1pvDa1w= Bytes: 8904 I have not understood the workflow yet. This is going to be long because it's my education on the subject that's the problem and it takes many lines to expose my thought process. I have two machines---an OpenBSD and a FreeBSD. The OpenBSD is called home and the FreeBSD is called fbsd. The machine fbsd is 24/7 on the Internet, but home is behind (at least one) NAT router. Their relevant configuration is shown below---I don't show the entire file because there are private keys in that file. The two pages that I've been trying to get help from are https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/Workflow.html and John Goerzen's NNCP concepts page at https://www.complete.org/nncp-concepts/ which is the one I've been as a guide. At first I tried file transmissions, but I failed to see the arrival of files, even though I think I might have transferred a text file properly. I then decided to try command execution thinking it would be something easier to get right: so I choose the program /uname/ to execute on the fbsd machine. (I show the configuration of both machines at the end of this post.) My attempt is to issue a uname execution on node fbsd but requested from node home and I expect to see the answer on node home (somehow). Here's what I said (to my shell) at node home: b# nncp-exec -cfg /etc/nncp.hjson fbsd uname 2025-04-11T23:49:36Z Tx uname 172 B/0 B 100% (0 B/sec) 2025-04-11T23:49:36Z Tx uname 172 B/0 B 100% (0 B/sec) 2025-04-11T23:49:59Z Tx uname 495 B/0 B 100% (14 B/sec) 2025-04-11T23:49:59Z Exec is sent to fbsd@uname (291 B) b# The reason you see three Tx lines is because I didn't know the command was reading my stdin---so I pressed ENTER (IIRC) a few times and then I must have pressed ^D to give the program the EOF byte. The program finished. So I thought---okay, the request has been added to a queue at node home. Now I must transfer that request to fbsd. Then I used nncp-call, having (before) ran nncp-daemon with the -ucspi flag at node fbsd: the command line for nncp-daemon on node fbsd was tcpserver -DHR -l 0 ::0 uucp nncp-daemon -quiet -ucspi So, at node home, I said b# nncp-call -cfg /etc/nncp.hjson fbsd 2025-04-11T23:52:10Z We have got for fbsd: 1 packets, 495 B 2025-04-11T23:52:11Z Connection to fbsd (somewhere.com:540) 2025-04-11T23:52:11Z Tx H2BB55FOK6ODPWVM..A6YIMSVWNXJUCO3Q 495 B/495 B 100% (0 B/sec) 2025-04-11T23:52:11Z Packet H2BB55FOK6ODPWVMUC2BSSB4OQREF7ROI7P3A6YIMSVWNXJUCO3Q is sent 2025-04-11T23:52:22Z Finished call with fbsd (0:0:11): 32 KiB received (32 KiB/sec), 33 KiB transferred (33 KiB/sec) Looks good. Now I'd think the request has been added to a queue at node fbsd. In other words, I believe the uname program has not been ran yet. I would now think that I must somehow process that queue on node fbsd. The section ``[c]ommands to process packets'' on John Goerzen's guide seems promising: it seems to say that I must run nncp-toss on the fbsd node. So I did and I got: # nncp-toss 2025-04-12T00:25:29Z Got exec from home to uname (15 B) Makes perfect sense. Now I don't know how I at node home could get the output of the command. I suppose that a new packet has been added to the outgoing queue at node fbsd and should be transferred to node home. (A packet containing the uname output, I mean.) But how could I transfer something to node home from node fbsd? Node home has no Internet address. So I'm thinking that node home must request that transfer itself. What would be the command? It looks like nncp-freq is only for a file request, not for receiving the output from a command execution. So I'm stuck here. I tried running nncp-stat just to see what I could see on both machines, but that told me not much: (*) At node home b# nncp-stat -cfg /etc/nncp.hjson fbsd self (*) At node fbsd # nncp-stat home self (*) Trying to make sense of the queues at node fbsd I also looked at /var/spool/nncp at node fbsd to see if I could identify a possible packet lingering on a queue. My hope was that I could spot a hash of some sort that would identify the packet that I'm expecting to get at node home (with the output of uname), but I see no match between the file names below and the ``hashes'' I see above---I'm not sure they're really hashes. # find ./ ../ ../tmp ../T3ULRRNAFLMMG7354E4KPS37M26SYS5BHZN5U3QIFS4J3SIXXPFA ../T3ULRRNAFLMMG7354E4KPS37M26SYS5BHZN5U3QIFS4J3SIXXPFA/tx ../T3ULRRNAFLMMG7354E4KPS37M26SYS5BHZN5U3QIFS4J3SIXXPFA/tx/hdr ../T3ULRRNAFLMMG7354E4KPS37M26SYS5BHZN5U3QIFS4J3SIXXPFA/rx ../T3ULRRNAFLMMG7354E4KPS37M26SYS5BHZN5U3QIFS4J3SIXXPFA/rx/hdr ../T3ULRRNAFLMMG7354E4KPS37M26SYS5BHZN5U3QIFS4J3SIXXPFA/toss.lock ../T3ULRRNAFLMMG7354E4KPS37M26SYS5BHZN5U3QIFS4J3SIXXPFA/tx.lock ../T3ULRRNAFLMMG7354E4KPS37M26SYS5BHZN5U3QIFS4J3SIXXPFA/DDZ76CQEAKIQNRLBEFHCU5IRWNOLAZZR2AYV24DXUFTUECKERZYQ ../T3ULRRNAFLMMG7354E4KPS37M26SYS5BHZN5U3QIFS4J3SIXXPFA/DDZ76CQEAKIQNRLBEFHCU5IRWNOLAZZR2AYV24DXUFTUECKERZYQ/IUJSLBWMPXYCINOFHJ42LC54T7TRKJAUOAOX6FT73BCRXPRIVMHQ ../T3ULRRNAFLMMG7354E4KPS37M26SYS5BHZN5U3QIFS4J3SIXXPFA/rx.lock ../home ../log.lock ../log ../DDZ76CQEAKIQNRLBEFHCU5IRWNOLAZZR2AYV24DXUFTUECKERZYQ ../DDZ76CQEAKIQNRLBEFHCU5IRWNOLAZZR2AYV24DXUFTUECKERZYQ/rx ../DDZ76CQEAKIQNRLBEFHCU5IRWNOLAZZR2AYV24DXUFTUECKERZYQ/toss.lock ../DDZ76CQEAKIQNRLBEFHCU5IRWNOLAZZR2AYV24DXUFTUECKERZYQ/tx.lock ../DDZ76CQEAKIQNRLBEFHCU5IRWNOLAZZR2AYV24DXUFTUECKERZYQ/DDZ76CQEAKIQNRLBEFHCU5IRWNOLAZZR2AYV24DXUFTUECKERZYQ # --8<-------------------------------------------------------->8--- --8<-------------------------------------------------------->8--- (*) Relevant configuration of fbsd neigh: { self: { # You should give public keys below to your neighbours id: DDZ76CQEAKIQNRLBEFHCU5IRWNOLAZZR2AYV24DXUFTUECKERZYQ exchpub: TF3QPHX2ZRK2FTLFIUJVXU6S32WVXJBHE6OWTD4WVFSXVWCC4FEQ signpub: HY2BWDIKZ6VOUT646MGJRWY7MCF3TKOLT5RROG66I3YA36UJ2UVQ noisepub: M3MO4SLJMXKDH2GPJ72KDQW2IY6JDVV3GVNJQTFHXJDD6MVLPYBA exec: { # Default self's sendmail command is used for email notifications sending sendmail: ["/usr/sbin/sendmail"] uname: ["/usr/bin/uname", "-a"] } } home: { id: T3ULRRNAFLMMG7354E4KPS37M26SYS5BHZN5U3QIFS4J3SIXXPFA exchpub: LHK42COUVEAJT6HTEO6JAITYLCR5TSYMZZTLI5PRKFFCOVR2SEZQ signpub: LLSNROV3VOR6MHHHLRV2BJ2DAV3MTETIN55TOCF4K7I2GFR3IRZQ noisepub: SB76WL2AS6KEL4D35SFFLTIVM3LFIW73AL5ZMEIXAH2NTKUQSJ2Q incoming: "/home/me/nncp" exec: { sendmail: ["/usr/sbin/sendmail"] uname: ["/usr/bin/uname", "-a"] } } } (*) Relevant configuration of home neigh: { self: { # You should give public keys below to your neighbours id: T3ULRRNAFLMMG7354E4KPS37M26SYS5BHZN5U3QIFS4J3SIXXPFA exchpub: LHK42COUVEAJT6HTEO6JAITYLCR5TSYMZZTLI5PRKFFCOVR2SEZQ signpub: LLSNROV3VOR6MHHHLRV2BJ2DAV3MTETIN55TOCF4K7I2GFR3IRZQ noisepub: SB76WL2AS6KEL4D35SFFLTIVM3LFIW73AL5ZMEIXAH2NTKUQSJ2Q exec: { # Default self's sendmail command is used for email notifications sending sendmail: ["/usr/sbin/sendmail"] uname: ["/usr/bin/uname", "-a"] } } fbsd: { id: DDZ76CQEAKIQNRLBEFHCU5IRWNOLAZZR2AYV24DXUFTUECKERZYQ exchpub: TF3QPHX2ZRK2FTLFIUJVXU6S32WVXJBHE6OWTD4WVFSXVWCC4FEQ signpub: HY2BWDIKZ6VOUT646MGJRWY7MCF3TKOLT5RROG66I3YA36UJ2UVQ noisepub: M3MO4SLJMXKDH2GPJ72KDQW2IY6JDVV3GVNJQTFHXJDD6MVLPYBA incoming: "/user/home/me/nncp" exec: { ========== REMAINDER OF ARTICLE TRUNCATED ==========