Black Box 4/BlackBox.cdr/lan/snuz.arj/SNUZ.DOC

Text File | 1991-06-24 | 8KB | 145 lines

Snuz is a simple netnews reading program. It supports reading and posting
News to an NNTP news server and in conjunction with an smtp program
will post mail replies.

Snuz is not "rn" or "nn" or "trn". It doesn't have kill files or threads.
It does allow going to any article in any group. It can save articles to files.

Snuz is NOT a Microsoft Windows program. But ...........
If you use the drivers that say they will work with Microsoft
Windows then Snuz will also do so. On my computer (a Dell 310) it will
run in all three modes of Windows 3.0 (including in the background and
in a window in 386 enhanced mode.) It seems to run correctly if you
load the packet driver either before you load Windows or just before
loading Snuz in a MS-DOS window. (Why run Snuz in the background?
Because it saves mail and postings until the end of your session and then
processes them, often with absolutely excruciating sluggishness.)

Snuz sometimes says that the host is trying to talk to you at the same
time you are to it, and recommends quitting. Don't quit, just be patient,
it seems to sort itself out.

Snuz is based on the "PCIP" series of programs. It requires that you have
installed a "packet driver" for your particular network card. I use
the ones that come with NCSA Telnet. They are available by anonymous
ftp from ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu. Another set which will work are on
sun.soe.clarkson.edu. Note that snuz can co-exist (i.e. run alternately
without a reboot) with programs (such as some versions of NCSA Telnet)
that use internal drivers by putting the actual call to snuz.exe in a batch
file preceded by a line which installs the packet driver, and followed by a
line which calls the program that comes with the packet drivers to remove the
driver from memory.

You will also need the .sys file called "netdev.sys" and the program
called custom.exe to set everything up for your network. Before you
run snuz you need to install netdev.sys.  Before you ever try to start snuz
you should say "custom netdev.sys" and fill in all the proper things.
This makes netdev.sys into a file that contains all the info about your
installation. Then you can do two things: one is to put netdev.sys in your
config.sys file. This will create a  "device" called netcust that acts like
a file. The programs "custom", "snuz", and "dsmtp"  operate on this file to
communicate parameters about your network to each other. Because netcust
(after installing netdev.sys) is a "device" it is available from any
directory. A second method is to copy netdev.sys to a file named "netcust" in
the directory which is the default directory when snuz is started. This seems
bizarre - a .sys file which can be read as an ordinary file. But it works.
If you put netdev.sys in your config.sys file then saying "custom netdev" will
change ONLY the core image of the file - your changes will last only until the
next reboot. If you make it into an actual FILE netcust, then any changes will
be permanent. Sigh. This is really complex. Don't blame me, blame the authors
of pcip.

To run Snuz you need to have a "Snuz.cfg" file and a Snuz.rc file. Edit
the supplied Snuz.cfg file to suit your situation, and make up a Snuz.rc
file. Snuz.cfg is self-explanatory. It must be in the same directory as
Snuz.exe, or, optionally, you may set an environment variable SNUZCFG
to point to the directory where it actually is (i.e. you can
set SNUZCFG=c:\mysnuz to look in directory c:\mysnuz.)

You need to have an editor that will edit your followup or mail file if
invoked with its filename. These are, of course, plain text files. I use
MicroEmacs to edit them. If you use a word processor, be sure that it does not
mangle files - for example, I tried WordPerfect 5.1 and it will happily read
and edit the files, but it somehow adds spaces to the needed blank lines at
the end of the header. It works if you delete the bogus spaces by hand.
These files are called tmp.nuz while editing, but are renamed to a
unique name with lots of numbers (x18466.nuz, for example). They are deleted
after the posting or mail is actually done. If for some reason you exit
Snuz with "e" instead of "q" they won't get sent. BUT next time you run
Snuz they will indeed be processed. The same thing happens if your
computer or network dies while reading the News. If your computer or network
dies between the time the message body is sent, but before the NNTP server
send its acknowledgement, that message gets left in the queue and will
eventually be sent twice.

Snuz.rc lists the newsgroups you wish to read. It has the format of
<newsgroup> <space> <number> (without the <>). Running Snuz with
the argument -S Snuz.rc will generate a file containing all the newgroups
your server has, together with appropriate numbers. These numbers are
the number of the first article you will read upon entering a group.
You can edit the file produced by "Snuz -S Snuz.rc" to get the groups
you want. You must have at least two good newsgroups listed.


The user interface for Snuz is quite simple. Just enter the program and
type "h" or "?" for a list of commands. If you just keep hitting return
you will progress your way through all your News. One missing item:
you can't back up a page during the reading of a long article. You can
go back to the beginning by typing "=", or you can type F an get put
into your editor, which will presumably allow looking around at will -
or even searching for things. Just be sure to tell Snuz not to
actually post the article again!! This is done by not answering "y"
to the question asked after your editor exits. The "I" command allows
you to search (non-case-sensitive) for a given string in the titles or
authors of articles. Hence you can find all articles by "george" (
this will, of course, find articles by george@a.b.c.d as well as
[e-mail], etc.) or all articles with some particular keywork in
their title.

Snuz has a simple mechanism so that you see cross-posted items only once:
they appear only in the newsgroup which appears first in your snuz.rc file.
This is different from the way some other readers work, where they appear in
the group you actually access first in time. This can be disabled by
the X command.

Snuz has no "post" command. You have to follow-up something. You can
easily do this by just editing the header.

The posting and mailing mechanism queues up all you items and processes
them at the end of your session. If you send mail, it spawns the program
"dsmtp.exe" to actually send it; posting is internal. This process,
at least on my news and mail server, is amazingly slow - sometimes five minutes
to send a single mail or news item! Running in the background with
a multitasker is suggested for the impatient.

The supplied smtp mail program dsmtp.exe will send mail items independent of
Snuz if you make a file with appropriate From: myname@a.b.c.d and
To: toname@e.f.g.h lines in the header. Just say "dsmtp filename mailservername".
If you give dsmtp the filename "sendmail.lst", as does Snuz, it considers
that as a list of files to mail, one filename to a line.

Be SURE to get you config file set up so that you give a valid From:
address: if your PC is like mine, mail to it will bounce - a very
unpleasant situation. Put a place that mail WILL reach in your From:
line. Test it by sending mail to yourself.

The parts of Snuz I have written are public domain. It is based on older
things which are freely distributable but not public domain.

Bugs: Who knows. It hasn't blown up on me recently, but given the general
flakiness of the whole PCIP that I based it on, there must be problems left.
If it DOES die, you very well better reboot your computer. Really!
One known bug has to do with it reading a news item with a number higher than
the last one your NNTP server indicates that it has. Apparently this
is harmless.

Changes: The main changes from beta 0.98 and 0.99 are the change allowing
specifying the configuration file from an environment variable (for
those who run multiple people on one machine and want different e-mail
return addresses) and a change to the way Snuz returns to the task of
just reading the next article from follow-ups or mail. It no longer
reads the same article again.

Doug McDonald ([e-mail])