If you don't have a UUCP connection, you can still use this program perfectly well without entering any options in this section.
First of all, who are you? WaterGate will append an "Organization" line to all messages it sends into Usenet. This can be a message gated from FidoNet or a message created by the system itself. You can enter a short line describing your organization or company.
Organization: Sweet Bug & Company, Holland
The UUCICO program searches for .CMD files in this directory. A .CMD file holds the names of the files to transfer.
News and mail is sent in .DAT files, where multiple news messages go in one file (called a batch) and mail messages are put in separate files.
The news batches can also be compressed using COMPRESS, COMP430D, or GZIP and can have a special header on top of that, called a "cunbatch" header.
The .DAT files contain all the data and the .XQT files contain the processing statements and tells us whether it is a mail message or a news batch. A program called XQT will then run the correct program to process these files.
Since WaterGate is compatible with the spool directory structure and has to create mail and news batches for systems that process them as described above, WaterGate creates .DAT, .XQT, and .CMD files.
The UUCICO does one thing more with .DAT and .XQT files when sending them: the receiving system renames them to .D and .X, so they can't overwrite any outgoing files. Since the .CMD file is only a command file for UUCICO, it is not transferred.
When WtrGate (the program) runs, it searches the userbase for UUCP style users, then checks if there is a sub-directory in this spool directory for that user and creates one if it doesn't exist already. It then searches for .X files and reads these. According to the contents of the .X file it then processes the .D file.
If something goes wrong during processing, or if it can't file the .D file, it renames the .X and .D files to .BAX and .BAD.
You have to put the spool directory path in the second field of the screen. Don't append any UUCPname whatsoever, just enter the path up and until the directory that is usually called SPOOL, as you can see in the example screen grab.
Note that the TBBS option module "PIMP" is not compatible with this spool directory structure, although it is capable of transferring files using the UUCP protocol.
In our case, our UUCPname is "wsd", which has to be typed in using the correct case (capital letters or not). The maximum length of this name is 12 characters, of which only 7 are significant.
WaterGate uses these names to see if a message is addressed to itself, for example for newsfix or for the listserver.
If you have a world wide registered UUCPname, you are also allowed to use the .UUCP convention, as in "wsd.UUCP". Don't enter this if you don't have a world wide registered UUCPname!
The first domain address should be your primary (most important) domain address. WaterGate uses this when it has to write messages. The list server, for example, will always advertise itself as listserver@<your first domain name> and there are loads of other places where this first domain name is used. Make sure this is your most important domain name. The other domain names are just used to detect that a message is for this system.
Examples of domain addresses:
UUCPname: rubbish
Domain names: rubbish.linknet.nl
rubbish.thehost.linknet.nl
rubbish.UUCP
In this example, WaterGate accepts mail addressed to 'rubbish',
'rubbish.linknet.nl', 'rubbish.thehost.linknet.nl', and
'rubbish.UUCP' as addressed to itself.
Your smarthost is usually the system from which you receive your mailfeed. Even if that system is not capable of smart routing, it should be able to transport the message to a system that is. Enter the UUCP name of your Smarthost in the 'Smarthost' field. Important! Make sure you define a UUCP style node for the system you assign as your smarthost.
Time zone: GMT
results in:
Fri, 19 Nov 1993 04:12:50 GMTAccording to the RFC regulations, this field should contain an official TimeZone identifier. Many sites in Europe tend to use 'CET' here, for 'Central European Time', commonly used by European cable and satellite stations such as MTV-Europe. However, this is NOT an official TimeZone!
Instead, European sites should indicate their relation to Greenwich time by using the timezone identifier, GMT, plus an adjustment. For the European mainland, this is GMT+1 in winters, and GMT+2 in summers (this is a direct result of the phenomenon 'daylight savings').
Some people like to put phony timezone identifiers here; this may be tremendous fun, but, although it won't bother WaterGate, correct mail handling by your smarthost or other mail systems involved cannot be guaranteed. There are some systems that seem to have a lot of CPU time left and they check to make sure this time zone is a valid string. If it is not, they simply trash the entire message! RFC1036 advises using the GMT time zone.
If you have downlinks that have trouble with large UUCP *.DAT files you may want to set the ".DAT length" option. WaterGate will then check whether a UUCP message bundle exceeds that limit. If so, it closes it and creates a new one. A setting of "0" disables this option. The default is "200000" (200k) bytes; remember that this is before compression!
Notice: mail jobs are always in one file. Even large files attached to a mail message are put in one big .DAT file.
In that case, there are two options. First, the message could be sent back to the originator, which can then take appropriate actions. Second, it can be written to the netmail area, so the administrator can have a look at it.
If you don't care about your telephone bill, then set this option to NO, in which case the entire message will be sent back to the originator.
You can set the grades for mail and news here. You normally don't have to worry about this setting, unless you want to change the grades (= letters in the filenames) used.
The problem is difficult the point out, but basically, your provider receives the jobs but then can't process them and your messages never arrive at their destination.
If this is the case with your UUCICO, then try the "No bitmask" option under WtrConf, System Configuration, UUCP settings.
You can enter the details and arguments of these programs in this screen:
For use with "compress" it is wise to define a decompressor here that can handle (and recognize) both 12 and 16 bit compression. WaterGate will usually be able to free up enough memory to perform 16 bit compression and decompression when shelling out to the (de)compressor by swapping itself to XMS/EMS/Disk.
Make sure you have the correct compression programs. You can find these on the Simtel 20 CD-ROM. On the September 1994 release it was on disc 2 in the directory \DISC2\COMPRESS. BBS's might use the description for this directory, which is "MS-DOS port of UNIX compress, gzip; and compression pgms".
The names of the files are:
COMP430D.ZIP
GZIP124.ZIP
Don't use PKZIP for GZIP compression or decompression because this will not work!
But, since there is no 'standard' AreaFix alike program for UUCP mail processors, WaterGate is unable to forward a request for such an area. To aid in the development of utilities that can interface with your UUCP host it is capable of creating a text file named UUCPREQ.LST on disk that contains the name of the requested area, and the system it has to be requested from.
You can define up to fifty (50) listing files and uplink systems. Normally there will only be one UUCP uplink, so you can utilize the other entries to split the listing of newsgroups.
To configure the newsfix forwarding, select UUCP newsfix forwarding from the System Configuration menu. You will then be presented with a listing with 50 entries. Press Enter to edit one of the entries, you will now see a screen like this:
The UUCP name will be written to the UUCPREQ.LST file and refers to your uplink. Nice there is no automatic processing possible, you could as well fill in another name.
The newsgroups listing path must be a complete path and filename. The format of the file is a newsgroups list. It starts with the areaname and optionally followed by a description and one or more options (/OPTION).
The description is put in the Comments field when a new record is created. An example of one line from this file:
alt.bbs.watergate WaterGate supportThe group is where the area is initially created. If you have a special group for Usenet areas, then you set this to the letter of that group.
Comments or questions? Send an e-mail to editor@wsd.wline.se.
Last updated 13 October 1996