This chapter will introduce one way to do that, which should work in most environments. However, it will not work in situations, where your provider doesn't support online news reading.
If your newsgroup access is limited to push feeding or UUCP transfer, then you should refer to the related chapters.
If you don't intend to import and export public news, then continue reading the part about how to use Changi for internal (only) news distribution.
First you must create a so called
watermark file, which
includes all groups you want to subscribe to, one newsgroup
name per line with a colon on the end. This file must be created
in a subdirectory of
CHANGIWORKDIR.
The name of the subdirectory
must equal the name of the remote host's domain. The name of the
watermark file itself should equal the remote's hostname
without domain, appended with the extension .watermark
.
Example:
The fully qualified domain name of the remote host is assumed
to be news.ping.de, while
CHANGIWORKDIR points to d:\changi.
We create a file named d:\changi\ping.de\news.watermark
with the following contents:
comp.os.os2.advocacy: comp.os.os2.mail-news:
Pitfall:
Make sure that all groups in the watermark file are
defined in the active file too. Otherwise articles will
be moved to the junk group.
You have just created a virgin watermark file. If you'd start requesting news with this file, the remote server will send you all available articles for all groups you entered in the watermark file. This could easily reach several Megabytes.
To avoid downloading large piles of outdated news articles, Chanx can run in a special mode called catch-up mode. In this mode Chanx will not download a single article, but synchronize the watermark file with the current status of the remote server.
Establish a connection to your provider, as you would do for online reading. At the command line change to the Changi working directory and enter
chanx -mC remote.news.serverReplace remote.news.server with the fully qualified domain name of the remote newsserver.
Chanx will respond with
Chanx 1.2 - Jul 00 0000 00:00:00 Nothing to post to remote.news.serverand stop after some seconds or minutes.
Keep the connection to your provider online, because we will soon call Chanx again.
Before doing this, call your editor again to view and modify the watermark file. You will find the watermark file updated with a number appended at each line. These numbers represent the highest available article number for each group.
Now change one of the numbers by reducing its value by, let's say, 10.
Example:
Change
comp.os.os2.advocacy: 318954 comp.os.os2.mail-news: 7634to
comp.os.os2.advocacy: 318954 comp.os.os2.mail-news: 7624With this modification our next connection, using different command line options of course, will retrieve articles 7625 upto 7634 of comp.os.os2.mail-news.
Save the modified file.
Pitfalls:
Chanx may be unable to talk to the remote server for serval
reasons. Make sure, that you are able to read news online
with your newsreader. It may have worked yesterday, but
may not work today. Providers reconfigure their software
from time to time and sometimes the remote server may be
overloaded and refuse any new connection. Do not blame
Chanx unless you've tried to connect the newsserver with
your reader.
Some providers have protected their servers with an authentication procedure and you need a user-id and password to get a connection. Fortunately Chanx supports authentication when being called with option -a:
chanx -mC -auser:password remote.news.serverReplace remote.news.server with the fully qualified domain name of the remote newsserver, user with your user-id and password with your password.
Connections may also time out on slow lines or heavily loaded remote servers after 1 minute of inactivity. Use option -w to increase this limit.
Example:
chanx -mxt -n1 -w300 news.ping.de >news.batchwill raise this timeout to 300 seconds.
As stated above, the connection to your provider should still be up. At the command line enter
chanx -mxt -n1 remote.news.server >news.batchReplace remote.news.server with the fully qualified domain name of the remote newsserver.
After displaying its version logo the program will show something similar to
Nothing to post to remote.news.server Total Good Bad T01 CONNSoon after, the last line should get updated to
8 0 0 CONNlater
10 7 0 7and at least to
10 10 0 10As the digits reflect the number of articles available or loaded, they will probably differ on each connection.
After Chanx terminates, the remote connection can be
terminated too. You will find the watermark file
updated with the highest article number you received in
each group. All retrieved articles are stored in the file
news.batch
.
Pitfalls:
If Chanx doesn't start counting, but terminates with
Nothing to post to localhost Total Good Bad T01 0 0 0there might be no article of the modified group available at the remote host. Try another group that you expect to have more traffic, like news.newusers.questions.
Remember, that all downloaded
articles are collected in the file news.batch
and
should now be inserted into the local newsbase. Make sure that
Changi is running in the background and enter
rnews -do <news.batchon the command line. Option
-do
instructs Rnews to
output log messages to the console. If everything worked correctly,
Rnews will terminate with
Jul 4 16:43:27 rnews: Rnews processed 10 articles in 4 secondsEnter
chanco oversync normalwhich notifies the Changi server about the new articles and start a background task to do some internal updating.
In fact this step is optional, but will speed up reading your articles locally. We are ready to do so right now.
You may use any newsreader. Unfortunately there are too many of them to give you any better explanation on how so set up your newsreader than the following.
Selecting options, preferences, setup or whatever change the name of newsserver or NNTP server to 127.0.0.1.
Some newsreader, like NR/2 for OS/2, offer a more simple way to connect to different server by simply adding a command line option.
nr2 127.0.0.1
Pitfall:
The following problem may appear while running NR/2 on an OS/2 machine.
Under rare conditions NR/2 appears, shuts down and reappears without a connection.
This problem may appear if you previously used NR/2 to read
news online from your provider's newsserver and later switched
back to Changi. It looks like an entry has been left in
TCPOS2.INI under Application CONNECTION / Key CURRENT_CONNECTION
which seems to force NR/2 to ignore the server given on the
command line.
Removing the CURRENT_CONNECTION
entry in TCPOS2.INI solves
the problem. No side effects have been reported so far. You need
an ini-file editor to do that.
If everything works as expected, you may simplify and optimize the steps needed for news retrieval. Best create a batch command file in the Changi directory with the following contents:
echo off echo Establish a connection to your provider and pause chanx -mx remote.news.server chanco oversync normalReplace remote.news.server with the fully qualified domain name of the remote newsserver.
This simplified Chanx call above will create three concurrent remote connections for article retrieval and automatically start Rnews in the background.
URL: changi/manual/firstnews.html Created: 4 November 1996 Revised: 21 November 1996 Author: harald@os2point.ping.de |