As mentioned in the previous chapter, news exchange among newsservers is performed by news clients.
In single user environments, you will retrieve new articles from as well as send your own postings to your provider's newsservers. This doesn't differ very much in case you are a provider of your own, but you'd then call the remote an up- or downlink.
Back to the single user configuration, your provider will usually not expect his customers, resp. you, to run their own newsservers. He will have configured his newsserver to be accessed by your newsreader client. At this point, Chanx enters the stage. This program will look from your provider's point of view like a simple, but fast reading newsreader.
So what you do is connecting to your provider and run Chanx. The program remembers articles already read in previous sessions and queries newly arrived articles. Of course, it will transfer your posts to the provider's newsserver as well.
But that's only half of the story. If started without special options, Chanx will start another client, called Rnews, in the background and pass to it each article retrieved from the provider's site. Rnews will connect your local Changi server and transmit each article from Chanx to Changi.
This might seem too complicated on the first look, and still remains complicated on a second. In fact, many failures on retrieving news from a remote server are established by bad configurations, because users aren't aware of Rnews and Changi being involved, when running Chanx.
The reason for running Rnews to connect to the local server can be easily explained. No other program than the newsserver itself should be allowed to directly access the local newsbase. This is the way used by newsservers to provide concurrent access.
You may still ask, why adding an extra step with Rnews and not directly transfer articles from Chanx to Changi. The answer is: Flexibility. Rnews is the program generally used to transfer articles to a newsserver. For performance reasons you may, for example, run Chanx in a special mode, in which all articles retrieved from the provider's newsserver are stored in a large batchfile and later run Rnews on that file. This procedure is often used to reduce connection times on low memory machines.
This flexibility offers other advantages. Rnews is not limited to connect to a local Changi server, but is able to transmit articles to any newsserver, local or remote, Changi or whatever. If you are a provider, connected to your uplink via leased line, you may not need Chanx at all. Instead, Changi should be configured to call Rnews with special options on each article posted by a newsreader (or after collecting a bunch of them) to directly transmit them to the uplink server. Downlinks are connected by calling Rnews on every incoming article of any newsgroup, the downlink has subscribed too.
However, although Rnews is included in most other newsserver packages, different programs may be used to transfer articles to up- and downlinks. Nevertheless, Rnews is a kind of standard interface used by many other news programs and makes it possible, to run Changi with third party news exchangers, like UUCP.
If all that was too much for the moment, just keep the following things in mind:
One last note:
Moderaters may miss a program named Inews within the Changi
package. Simply create a copy of Rnews and name it Inews. If
Rnews detects, that it has been renamed to Inews, it will
default to the expected Inews behaviour. If you don't know,
what I'm talking about, you probably won't need this feature.
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URL: changi/manual/whatserv.html Created: 21 July 1997 Revised: 21 July 1997 Author: harald@os2point.ping.de |