Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!wugate!uunet!intercon!amanda@intercon.com From: amanda@intercon.com (Amanda Walker) Newsgroups: news.software.nntp Subject: Re: .newsrc across the network Message-ID: <1510@intercon.com> Date: 27 Oct 89 20:59:53 GMT References: Sender: news@intercon.com Reply-To: amanda@intercon.com (Amanda Walker) Organization: InterCon Systems Corporation Lines: 33 In article , nelson@sun.soe.clarkson.edu (Russ Nelson) writes: > Is there anyone out there who's addressing the problem of running a > NNTP client on a machine with no local storage? > > The obvious solution is to provide for user authentication, and storage > and retrieval and possibly manipulation of the .newsrc file. > > A more (or less :-) drastic solution is to create a new protocol, the NNRP, > Net News Reading Protocol. > -- > --russ (nelson@clutx [.bitnet | .clarkson.edu]) > Live up to the light thou hast, and more will be granted thee. > A recession now appears more than 2 years away -- John D. Mathon, 4 Oct 1989. The easiest thing I can think of off the top of my head is to prompt for a user name and password for your NNTP host and use FTP to gleep the user's .newsrc, and then put it back when you are done. Writing a little captive FTP client shouldn't be too hard, and is certainly easier than doing authentication locally on the PC. The basic flow of control would be: Prompt for user name & password Use these to FTP the .newsrc file. open your NNTP connection and read news FTP the .newsrc back. The only problem is that if someone else is reading news from the same account at the same time, one of the people is going to be annoyed :-). -- Amanda Walker