Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!munnari.oz.au!bruce!merlin!ianh From: ianh@resmel.bhp.com.au (Ian Hoyle) Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo Subject: Re: Info on setting up net news. Message-ID: Date: 10 Jun 91 00:12:17 GMT References: <9106072205.AA12094@hobbes.mdc.com> Sender: usenet@resmel.bhp.com.au (USEnet nntp account) Organization: BHP Research - Melbourne Laboratories, AUSTRALIA Lines: 72 johnb@HOBBES.MDC.COM (John Breen) writes: >>Could some kind soul point me to the latest versions of the sources [of news >>software] I will need and point out any configuration problems I should be >>aware of? >For an internet (read non-UUCP ?) site, I've been told (by a news administrator >that I'm going to try to get a feed from) that I would need the following (we're >connected to the news "source" via NSFNet): >" - cnews > - nntp > - rn, nn, or trn > - plenty of disk space..." I have been administering net news/mail at this site for about 3 years using a DN3500 as the primary node providing these services. For about 2 1/2 yrs we received our feed from a site using some Australian developed software called MHSnet (well to be precise there was a precursor to this called SUN III, but that complicates matters :-) which acts as a store/ forward message transport system **much** better than uucp - ie. it is resilient to breaks in connection and allows partial resending of messages (and the message could be a mail item, compressed news batch, remotely requested file etc.). Suffice to say I can't comment on uucp and in any case we are now internet connected so that problem has gone away now .... As for the news transport system, we used for some time B-news 2.11.19, but as many news administrators know this is SLOW. We now take a full feed of ~1000 newsgroups and the overheads involved in unwrapping news batches are really quite daunting for a slow machine like the 3500. A few months back I took the plunge and started using Cnews (now at the most recent patch level). I'm impressed by the quality of this software and the speed with which it does it's stuff. Henry Spencer and Geoff Collyer are great contributors to news.software.b where the news transport software is discussed and bug fixes/improvements are contributed regularly - in short a well engineered and supported public domain piece of code. The most recent version of nntp (1.5.11) runs just fine (I live under bsd and use the cc6.7 compiler and not the newer ANSI beast) and allows the use of remote news readers and also transport of news itself to other machines over TCP/IP. News readers tend to rely on personal taste more than anything - I support the following readers on a variety of machines including DECstations, SUN, Apollo, Mac (AUX) & SGI using nntp. vn - v. old reader under no further development rn - a new version 4.4 about to be released nn - LOTS of bells and whistles (I use it a lot) Generally these are mature pieces of code and will compile with not too many problems on Apollos. Nothing much more to add. You can probably pick up most of these goodies from a kind net-neighbour !!, ian -- Ian Hoyle /\/\ Image Processing & Data Analysis Group / / /\ BHP Research - Melbourne Laboratories / / / \ 245 Wellington Rd, Mulgrave, 3170 / / / /\ \ AUSTRALIA \ \/ / / / \ / / / Phone : +61-3-560-7066 \/\/\/ FAX : +61-3-561-6709 E-mail : ianh@resmel.bhp.com.au