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Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site brl-tgr.ARPA
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!harpo!seismo!brl-tgr!wmartin
From: wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin )
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: News readers changing hosts
Message-ID: <2973@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 17-May-84 09:25:28 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.2973
Posted: Thu May 17 09:25:28 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 18-May-84 02:18:32 EDT
Organization: Ballistics Research Lab
Lines: 41

The following situation just came up, and it inspires an inquiry as to
whether an automated method of performing the desired action exists:

The account on which I read netnews is being moved from host brl-vgr to 
host brl-tgr. These hosts do NOT have the same netnews file structure;
-tgr came on-line long after -vgr, and started receiving netnews and 
(therefore) assigning numbers to incoming articles on its own. So
while my .newsrc file on brl-vgr points to "Article 400 of 450" as
being the first unread new article in a given newsgroup, brl-tgr
may have only 200 articles in that newsgroup, so the "400" in the
copied-over .newsrc file points far into the future, and cannot be
used on the new host.

Is there any way of updating the .newsrc file to take this change
into account, other than manually editing it? I would think that
moving between hosts is fairly common (I've now done it many times),
and someone would have worked out a method for putting a reader
into the correct place in the newsgroups after such a move, to
avoid manually plodding through each of many groups with the "n" 
key and a new, blank .newsrc to get back to where you used to be.

Such an automated update processing could be done, I would think,
perhaps by "taking a snapshot" of the .newsrc pointers on the old host,
storing the article-ID's in a file, and then moving that file to the
new host and running a process with it as input which could create a new
.newsrc file. The process could look at the article ID's in each
newsgroup, match them with the "snapshot", and put that article number
as the first-posting-to-be-seen in the new .newsrc.

This assumes that the articles are in the same sequence on each host.
Admittedly dangerous if you were moving from one end of USENET to
another, but should be safe if you are moving within a local area.

Well, does such a thing exist? I'm going to have to do it manually
now, anyway, since I can't wait for (or even see!) any replies
unless I fix my .newsrc over here right away, but maybe it will help
others and also help me the next time I move.

Will Martin

ARPA/MILNET: wmartin@almsa-1   USENET/uucp: brl!wmartin