> At last.... read (no sending yet) news groups (NNTP) with
> Arachne.
Hi Alejandro,
this weekend I have been playing a lot with UKA-PPP/YARN,
including your recently posted Arachne APM. Here is my comment.
Regards
Christof Lange
UKA-PPP/YARN
------------
I started to like a lot YARN ver. 0.92 and set it up for use
with e-mail as well as for newsgroups. Considering the international
charset, MIME and the folder management Yarn cannot compete with
Pmail. But as a news client it is far superior.
When I finally got to work UKA-PPP it seemed to be quite reliable.
Most important was the reduction of files: I actually kept only 15
of 167! I finally deleted all those scripts and menus and wrote two
batch files, one for YARN and one for UKA-PPP. The latter contains
menu options:
Offline menu
1 Dial
2 Read mail and news
3 News options
4 Mail options
0 Exit
Online menu
1 Get news
2 Get mail
3 Send mail
4 Hang up
I consider UKAPPP as an alternative to Arachne on PC386 or lower.
Thus it may work as mail transport agent in connection with Pmail,
as all the other ones seem to be worse than Arachne's built-in mta.
YARN is the appropriate way of working with newsgroups - without
graphical interface, of course! To implement a 'get news' function
into Arachne or at least sharing Arachne's connection while online
does make sense to me. But I do not think that the Arachne mail
interface (even with a line 'newsgroup: ' in the message header)
can be very useful to read the incoming news articles.
NNEWS.ZIP
---------
Anyway I tested your APM, customized it for my directory structure
and made a few changes that I want to share with you. Here are the
files:
NNEWS BAT modified
NNSETUP BAT modified
SEPARATE EXE I renamed your modification of X_SPOOL.EXE
TCPPORT EXE
X_NNEWS EXE
NNEWS OOK modified
TEST RC instead of microssoft.rc
TEST GR new
MY_NNEWS TXT this file
*** NNEWS.BAT ***********************************
@echo off
p:
cd \spool
md nnews
p:\separate.exe n????.msg /ar
move p:\spool\nnews\*.mes p:\%home%.mai
rem move p:\spool\nnews\*.mes p:\nnews.nb
rd nnews
cd \
for %%f in (p:\%home%.mai\n*.mes) do ren %%f *.cnm
rem for %%f in (p:\nnews.nb\n*.mes) do ren %%f *.cnb
****************************************************
As my PC386 has only 8MB RAM and Arachne sits on a RAM drive I need to
download news to the harddisk (P:). P:\%home%.mai is my Newmail
directory
for Pmail (and as well Arachne's main mail directory). As I like to
read
incoming mail with Arachne and Pmail, I have modified inbox.dgi to
read
.cn? extensions. I made some experiments to move the articles to a
Noticeboard directory within Pmail (p:\nnews.nb). But Pmail actually
is not very useful as a news reader. Above those lines are commented
out.
Rather than applying a separate news folder I would suggest a specific
file extension (e.g. .cnb) that can be handled by a line in mime.cfg
(compare our recent discussion on marking files in inbox as old).
Your hardcoded directory structures caused a slight problem. I finally
decided to create a temporary directory for reformatting. And I wonder
whether separate.exe (a.k.a nnews.exe a.k.a. x_spool.exe is really
necessary. The incoming .msg files could probably be split up with
some unix-like text utility.
*** NNSETUP.BAT **********************************
cls
@echo off
echo This batch file will load necessary files
echo to allow downloading netnews (USENET)
echo groups and reading them with Arachne
echo.
echo Arachne must be in d:\arachne directory
echo.
pause
copy tcpport.exe p:\
copy x_nnews.exe p:\
copy separate.exe p:\
copy test.rc p:\
copy test.gr p:\
copy nnews.bat p:\
copy nnews.ook d:\arachne\oops
md p:\spool
****************************************************
Only nnews.ook is copied to the Arachne directory. The UKAPPP
program and configuration files sit on the hard disk. Download
speed is limited by modem. Using RAM disk as target does not
offer any advantage.
*** NNEWS.OOK ****************************************
@echo off
cls
echo.
echo Downloading USENET groups
echo.
d:
cd \arachne
if not exist IP-UP.bat goto off
call IP-UP.bat
rem>wattcp.cfg
echo my_ip=%myip% >> wattcp.cfg
echo gateway=%remip% >> wattcp.cfg
echo netmask=%netmask% >> wattcp.cfg
echo nameserver=212.20.96.34 >> wattcp.cfg
echo nameserver=212.20.96.38 >> wattcp.cfg
echo peermru=%peermru% >> wattcp.cfg
echo sockdelay=60 >> wattcp.cfg
echo domainslist="volny.cz" >> wattcp.cfg
echo popuser="[EMAIL PROTECTED]" >> wattcp.cfg
echo HELO=on >> wattcp.cfg
echo TZ="-1" >> wattcp.cfg
set myip=%MYIP%
:off
copy wattcp.cfg P:\
:NNTP
cls
echo NEWS
p:
cd p:\
tcpport.exe news.felk.cvut.cz 119 x_nnews.exe test.rc
pause
cls
echo.
echo Unpacking USENET groups
echo.
call nnews.bat
pause
d:
cd \arachne
******************************************************
Only a few remarks:
- As I run Arachne on RAM disk and change to another drive,
I need to return to the RAM disk in the end
- The Czech server news.felk.cvut.cz is my favourite one.
- My IPS's nameservers are 212.20.96.34 and 212.20.96.38
- What took me the most time to find out: for the news server
the popuser is NOT ("cce.zizkov"), but the complete e-mail
address ("[EMAIL PROTECTED]")
And finally a few words on the news configuration files:
- TEST.RC : does not need any type of header if the name of the
server is listed in the command line. Instead of 50 MS articles
I suggest just 5 Linux articles:
alt.os.linux.slackware -5
- TEST.GR : a dummy list should be provided in the APM package,
in order to prevent the news server from sending a 2,5 MB list.
e.g. a one-line-file:
!new_groups:030621 125057
_______________________________________________
Christof Lange <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Prokopova 4, 130 00 Praha 3, Czech Republic
phone: (+420) 222 78 06 73 / 222 78 20 02
http://www.volny.cz/cce.zizkov
