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  • using nnrpd on cnews spool

    From Julian Bradfield@21:1/5 to All on Wed Nov 23 22:05:22 2022
    I read my bazillion mailing lists by feeding them into a private
    (non-root) installation of c-news, which I have kept going for about
    30 years (with occasional pain coping with the changes in Unix over
    the years, but nowadays things don't change much:).

    I've always read this direct from the spool directory, but sshfs is
    very slow, and I'd like nntp access.

    Unfortunately, I failed to save a copy of nntpd along with c-news, and
    now nntpd is no longer to be found anywhere on the web (as far as I
    see).

    So:

    question 1: Can I use INN's nnrpd directly on a c-news spool, or does
    nnrpd need other files created by INN ?

    question 2: If I decide finally to abandon c-news, should switching my
    system over to INN be a simple drop in replacement of binaries, plus
    suitable configuration? It rather looks that way. (The only way news
    comes in to the system is being being piped into newsspool by procmail
    - I guess that would switch to INN's inew.)

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Russ Allbery@21:1/5 to Julian Bradfield on Wed Nov 23 15:53:44 2022
    Julian Bradfield <[email protected]> writes:

    I read my bazillion mailing lists by feeding them into a private
    (non-root) installation of c-news, which I have kept going for about 30
    years (with occasional pain coping with the changes in Unix over the
    years, but nowadays things don't change much:).

    I've always read this direct from the spool directory, but sshfs is
    very slow, and I'd like nntp access.

    Unfortunately, I failed to save a copy of nntpd along with c-news, and
    now nntpd is no longer to be found anywhere on the web (as far as I
    see).

    https://snapshot.debian.org/package/nntp/1.5.12.1-19.1/

    So:

    question 1: Can I use INN's nnrpd directly on a c-news spool, or does
    nnrpd need other files created by INN ?

    nnrpd needs a history file and an overview database, and won't be able to
    use the ones generated by C News. It will be happy with the article tree,
    but you'll need to run makehistory and makeoverview on it.

    question 2: If I decide finally to abandon c-news, should switching my
    system over to INN be a simple drop in replacement of binaries, plus
    suitable configuration? It rather looks that way. (The only way news
    comes in to the system is being being piped into newsspool by procmail
    - I guess that would switch to INN's inew.)

    Or possibly rnews. Yeah, you'll need to generate the databases as
    mentioned above, but INN's tradspool article format should be compatible
    with C News. That said, I suspect that C News probably stored files in
    native format rather than wire format, so you'll need to tell INN (with
    the wireformat: false setting) to do line ending conversion. Or at least that's required for writing; I forget if it figures it out on the fly for reading (it might).

    --
    Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
    <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Julian Bradfield@21:1/5 to Russ Allbery on Thu Nov 24 09:09:45 2022
    On 2022-11-23, Russ Allbery <[email protected]> wrote:
    Julian Bradfield <[email protected]> writes:
    [...]
    Unfortunately, I failed to save a copy of nntpd along with c-news, and
    now nntpd is no longer to be found anywhere on the web (as far as I
    see).

    https://snapshot.debian.org/package/nntp/1.5.12.1-19.1/

    Ah, thank you! Need to work more on my google-fu, then...

    question 2: If I decide finally to abandon c-news, should switching my
    system over to INN be a simple drop in replacement of binaries,
    plus

    [...]

    with C News. That said, I suspect that C News probably stored files in native format rather than wire format, so you'll need to tell INN (with

    Yes, it does.

    Thanks very much!

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Russ Allbery@21:1/5 to Julian Bradfield on Thu Nov 24 08:32:52 2022
    Julian Bradfield <[email protected]> writes:
    On 2022-11-23, Russ Allbery <[email protected]> wrote:

    https://snapshot.debian.org/package/nntp/1.5.12.1-19.1/

    Ah, thank you! Need to work more on my google-fu, then...

    I don't think the contents is in Google in any useful way, and given the
    name of the software, it's quite hard to find with search. If you didn't
    know it existed, I'm not sure how you'd find out with Google. I just
    happened to remember that both C News and its NNTP implementation were
    packaged for Debian back in the day, and tried a few variations on the
    package name until I found the right one.

    --
    Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
    <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Julian Bradfield@21:1/5 to Russ Allbery on Fri Nov 25 16:27:28 2022
    On 2022-11-24, Russ Allbery <[email protected]> wrote:
    Julian Bradfield <[email protected]> writes:
    On 2022-11-23, Russ Allbery <[email protected]> wrote:

    https://snapshot.debian.org/package/nntp/1.5.12.1-19.1/

    Ah, thank you! Need to work more on my google-fu, then...

    I don't think the contents is in Google in any useful way, and given the
    name of the software, it's quite hard to find with search. If you didn't know it existed, I'm not sure how you'd find out with Google. I just

    Thanks for making me feel better :)

    I tried to get it working, but there's some deadlock in the networking
    (which I also suffer with another ancient program), and it's not worth
    the effort of fixing.

    So I have converted my system over to INN - thanks!

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)