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.
.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:
Pitfalls:
For the first test do not include more than two or three
groups to reduce test run turnaround times. It could be
very frustrating to spend your time on a large watermark
file, wait to download a large pile of news and at
last find out that something went miserably wrong.
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.
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
12 0 0 CONNlater
314 117 0 117and at least to
314 314 0 314As 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 articles of the specified groups available at the remote host. Try another group that you expect has more traffic, like news.newusers.questions.
Note also that Chanx updates the watermark file to avoid retrieving the same articles again. Remove the number following the colon in this file, if you want to get the old articles again.
Connections will 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.
news.batch
and should now be inserted
into the local newsbase. Make sure that Changi is still 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
Nov 4 16:43:27 rnews: Rnews processed 314 articles in 74 secondsEnter
chanco oversync normalwhich notifies the Changi server about the new articles and start a background task to do some internal updating.
nr2 127.0.0.1
Pitfalls:
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.
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 |