The next chapters will cover the following topics:
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 server'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. Create a file named d:\changi\ping.de\news.watermark with the following contents:
comp.os.os2.advocacy: comp.os.os2.mail-news:Option -mx instructs Chanx to query for new articles with the XOVER command.
chanx -mx news.ping.deReplace
news.ping.de
with the fully qualified
domain name of your remote newsserver.After Chanx successfully finishes the session with the remote server, it will update the watermark file by adding the highest article number retrieved. On the next session it will continue with the numbers found in the watermark file.
Remember, that article numbers are assigned to articles by the newsserver and so they will differ from site to site. For example, article 1022 of group alt.hackers on your machine may be article number 2937745 on your provider's site.
chanx news.logoport.com comp.os.os2*,alt* 961224 000000This will query the server news.logoport.com for all articles of newsgroups beginning with comp.os.os2 and alt, which had been received by this server since 12/24/96.
After Chanx successfully finishes the session with the remote server, it will store the name of the newsgroups and the time of the last request in a file named news.last in directory logoport.com.
For subsequent connects you simply enter
chanx news.logoport.comChanx will only retrieve those articles which have been received by the remote server after the time of your last query.
You are free to edit the news.last file in order to change your list of newsgroups or the date of your last request.
Chanx will never update an existing host.last file with a new list of newsgroups. It will only update the date and time field in this file.
However, if you call Chanx with groups, date and time parameters and the host.last file already exists then Chanx will not update anything, but will treat this session as an out-of-sequence connect. This offers you the opportunity of retrieving a bunch of articles which may have got lost on your site, or retrieving some groups which you don't want to get on a regular basis.
If you want to change the list of groups to be retrieved by default, then you must, first, manually edit host.last and, second, also run Chanco with the newgroup or rmgroup parameter.
The advantage of using NEWNEWS to query new articles is, that you may freely change the remote server and even get the same newsgroups from different servers. Chanx will take care, that you won't retrieve more than a single copy of each article, because new articles are reported and retrieved by message-id rather than by number. The message-id of an article is kept during its whole lifetime, but the article number usually differs from server to server.
However, some servers do not allow to use NEWNEWS, because this command uses too many system resources on the remote site. Unfortunately, more and more newsadmins disable NEWNEWS on their machines.
Like with the XOVER method described above, you must create a watermark file before connecting a remote server for the very first time.
Specify option -mw to enable this most compatible retrieval method.
chanx -mw news.logoport.com
Using option -ld will store message-ids or article numbers of dropped articles in host.drop.
Use option -ld to store overview lines of dropped articles in host.drop.
If a file named CXDROP.CMD is found in CHANGIWORKDIR, then Chanx will first retrieve the header of an article and pass all header lines as arguments to this REXX macro.
If CXDROP.CMD returns 0, Chanx will retrieve the corresponding article. A return value of 1 will drop it.
Calling Chanx with option -ld will store message-ids or article numbers of dropped articles in host.drop.
Chanco -v flushlogs Chanco -v oversync normal
URL: changi/manual/chanx.html Created: 3 August 1996 Revised: 8 December 1996 Author: harald@os2point.ping.de |