Re: Offline news access (was: smail config for an ISP with PPP+SMTP+POP3 - How to do?)
Daniel Gross wrote:
>
> Hi all!
>
> Thanks to the ones, who helped me with my "smail configuration problem".
> (Martin Bialasinski, David Stern and Bob Nielsen)
>
> But, NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT! Hey it's not so different at all.
> Now that my eMail works fine, I also want to access to USENET News. Until now,
> I could read it online (using tin), but the german Telekom (our phone company)
> has horrible fares, so I want to download my (a little more than a) handfull
> newsgroups, and read it offline. Another thing is, that the "From:" field is
> not filled with the right address. It allways contains dg@127.0.0.1 which is
> not very usefull (even when it prevents you from spam mails).
>
> Can anyone help me again? What should I do? Configuring my own (local) news
> server? Using an other newsreader?
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> Daniel Gross
You can also use "pnf" which is like suck. To quote the README:
> PNF is Personal News Fetcher. It's intended use is similar to that of suck,
> that is, to get articles to feed a small news spool.
>
> PNF came into existence during the late summer of 1996 to cope with
> the frequent news problems my ISP was having, the most challenging to
> suck being an intermittently broken history database. Because of
> suck's method of avoiding re-downloading cross-posts, it downloads
> with HEAD/BODY/ARTICLE <Message-ID> NNTP commands. Since Message-ID
> based commands depend on a good history database, an alternative was
> necessary. The well-known perl 'seen' hash array idiom was employed
> to get an as-you-go duplicate checker, and when combined with Rodger
> Anderson's NNTPClient module, the immediate problem was handled in
> surprisingly short order.
...
> PNF now does more or less what suck does, plus some other things that may
> give it reason to exist beyond its current home. It can send articles
> directly to an NNTP server through IHAVE, avoiding intermediate storing
> and batching. It can pipe an rnews batch to a program, say, pnews_expand
> from Jim Buchanan's pnews package, again avoiding storing. Because of
> its newsreader-like downloading approach, it accomodates the use by
> ISPs of reader-only machines with nnrpds with their history shorted out
> (Who could that have been?). Finally, and most telling I think, it's written
> in Perl! :-) ( Egil Kvaleberg's NewsX does IHAVE and rnews to a pipe, and
> other nifty things, among them many features targeted for bigger setups
> than PNF is meant for. You can run a multiuser news spool with NewsX.
> You probably couldn't with PNF.)
The only drawback is that pnf isn't a debian package. I had no trouble getting
it to work. Check comp.os.linux.announce archive for more details.
--
Jens B. Jorgensen
jjorgens@bdsinc.com
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