During this documentation, the term WaterGate refers to the entire package and the terms WtrGate, WtrConf and WtrUtil refer to separate programs of this package.
To start, unpack the archive containing the program files into a new directory on your hard disk, for example C:\WTRGATE. At least the following three executables should be present in the archive:
WTRGATE.EXE
WTRCONF.EXE
WTRUTIL.EXE
You might want to set a environment variable called WTRGATE to this directory so WaterGate knows where to find its configuration files when not started from its home directory. Add this line to your autoexec.bat file:
SET WTRGATE=C:\WTRGATE
Then run the configuration program, WtrConf, to create new configuration and database files. If you don't run it from the installation directory, make sure the WTRGATE environment variable is set, as indicated above. You might want to reboot or set it manually before continuing.
After starting WtrConf, you will see the following menu:
You can select a menu line with the cursor keys up and down. To select one of the options, press enter. You can also exit a menu by pressing escape. In this case, pressing escape will present another menu, asking if you really want to quit the program. Select Yes and press enter to quit, or press escape again to return to the main menu. You can also exit the program by selecting the bottom menu option. To get there, use the cursor keys or press PgDn (page down).
To get back at the top of the menu, press PgUp (page up). You can also use the Home and End keys. You can always use function key F1 to get context sensitive help. Try pressing F1 in the Main Menu.
To remove the help window, you have to press escape. It is sometimes possible to use special keys in the help screens, like PgUp and PgDn. The help screens will tell you when.
Last remark before we start. Have a look at the bottom line of the screen. It shows most of the keys you can use throughout the program and will change to reflect the keys you can use at a certain point.
The keys line looks like this when you are in a menu:
We start with System Configuration, so select the top option from the Main Menu and press enter. You are now presented with a new menu, which looks like this:
The System configuration menu is split into several parts, starting with general system settings, followed by five options that have to do with FidoNet settings, followed by three options for UUCP configuration settings. The last separate options are to setup the gateway and the private mail scanning system, to tune the log file and to setup the administrator.
This is a window with fields where you can enter data. You can use the cursor keys up and down to go through the fields. There are a number of different type of editing fields, but they all have one thing in common: press enter to edit the contents.
When editing a text field, you can always press escape to stop editing and restore the old contents. If you are satisfied with the new contents, you have to press the enter key to accept the changes. Inside the field, you can use the cursor keys left and right to move the cursor through the field. The backspace and delete keys work as expected. Insert mode is always on, though.
You can clear the contents of the field from the cursor position to the end of the field, by using the WordPerfect method: ctrl+end. To jump to the following or previous word, you can hold down the control key (ctrl) and use the cursor keys again. Finally, the home key brings you to the beginning of the field and the end key to the last character of the contents.
The SysOp field is used when WaterGate has to write special replies, for example for AreaFix. More about that later. Let's go to the next field.
WTRGATE=C:\WTRGATE ->
WTRCFG.TDB ->
System Path ->
The other *.TDB files
At this moment, the method used to identify duplicates inside the WaterGate program is not very robust. We therefore advise big systems to disable duplicate checking until we have implemented a better algorithm. (At this moment, one database with a maximum of 16000 entries is used to keep track of all FidoNet and UUCP messages. No way is this enough for a system receiving packets via satellite. Future algorithms will not only separate Fido and UUCP dupes, but also do message/reply id bridging and allow a bigger duplicates database).
The first field you can set for the duplicates checking is a "toggle" field. Toggles are used to select from two or more predefined options, in this case ON and OFF. You can only use enter to toggle the setting. The one in upper case is the current selection.
The next field is a numeric input field, where (in this case) you can input the number of duplicates WaterGate has to "remember". The number in our example window is 10000, which means WaterGate will identify two duplicates, even if 9999 messages are sent in between. The maximum number you can enter here is 16000.
When a duplicate message is found, it will be destroyed by default. Later in the configuration, you can also create a message base to put the duplicates in.
By default, WaterGate tries to open up to 8 handles for outgoing mail packets. If you don't export mail to other computers, then you can reduce this setting to 1. If you do export mail, try increasing this number by 1 for each node. WaterGate is capable of using up to 100 file handles. If you have more nodes than handles, files are closed in a priority order: the more mail a node receives, the less often its packets are opened and closed.
Depending on its configuration, WaterGate needs up to 10 file handles for its own use, the system will use a few too, so make sure you have a matching number in your CONFIG.SYS:
At startup, WaterGate will copy its databases into XMS memory, up to the amount of available memory. WaterGate has no other use for XMS memory besides caching its databases and shelling.
If you use a swap file (see below), WaterGate will only use the oversized directory if the swap file gets full as well.
This path is also used to write the statistics file. This file takes the same name as the log file, but with the extension .STA. So, if your log file is called WTRGATE.LOG, the statistics log is named WTRGATE.STA and put in the same directory as the log file.
Since WaterGate is not capable of using XMS memory to store messages, you might be able to setup the swap file on a RAM-drive and let the RAM-drive use XMS memory. In this case, though, the swap file is limited by the available memory. It may be better to put the swap file on hard disk, so you can process those 1 megabyte+ news and FTP-mail messages easily.
You can use the toggle 'Use swap file?' to switch the swap file usage on and off. It is on by default.
The main use for the limit is when putting the swap file on a RAM-drive. Depending on your mail configuration, between 1 and 2 megabytes should be enough for the swap file. Let us know if you ever have to process bigger files (FTP-mail).
If you are experiencing problems with the time slicing support, then you can switch it off by setting this toggle to NO. Otherwise leave it to YES.
If the free spaces runs below the limit set in this field, then WtrGate will stop.
Comments or questions? Send an e-mail to editor@wsd.wline.se.
Last updated 13 October 1996