wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin ) (05/17/84)
The following situation just came up, and it inspires an inquiry as to whether an automated method of performing the desired action exists: The account on which I read netnews is being moved from host brl-vgr to host brl-tgr. These hosts do NOT have the same netnews file structure; -tgr came on-line long after -vgr, and started receiving netnews and (therefore) assigning numbers to incoming articles on its own. So while my .newsrc file on brl-vgr points to "Article 400 of 450" as being the first unread new article in a given newsgroup, brl-tgr may have only 200 articles in that newsgroup, so the "400" in the copied-over .newsrc file points far into the future, and cannot be used on the new host. Is there any way of updating the .newsrc file to take this change into account, other than manually editing it? I would think that moving between hosts is fairly common (I've now done it many times), and someone would have worked out a method for putting a reader into the correct place in the newsgroups after such a move, to avoid manually plodding through each of many groups with the "n" key and a new, blank .newsrc to get back to where you used to be. Such an automated update processing could be done, I would think, perhaps by "taking a snapshot" of the .newsrc pointers on the old host, storing the article-ID's in a file, and then moving that file to the new host and running a process with it as input which could create a new .newsrc file. The process could look at the article ID's in each newsgroup, match them with the "snapshot", and put that article number as the first-posting-to-be-seen in the new .newsrc. This assumes that the articles are in the same sequence on each host. Admittedly dangerous if you were moving from one end of USENET to another, but should be safe if you are moving within a local area. Well, does such a thing exist? I'm going to have to do it manually now, anyway, since I can't wait for (or even see!) any replies unless I fix my .newsrc over here right away, but maybe it will help others and also help me the next time I move. Will Martin ARPA/MILNET: wmartin@almsa-1 USENET/uucp: brl!wmartin
faunt@saturn.UUCP (Doug Faunt) (05/18/84)
I just went through this exercise, and the way I did it was to get caught up-to-date during a period in which no news feed was going on, and then by using readnews -p >/dev/null, getting my .newsrc on the new machine also up-to-date. (up-to-date means no aricles left to be read.) This only works for moving on machines at the same site, approximately, and if there is a time during which no news feed happens. This is the case here since both machines involved are fed from the same machine, and no news passes during "normal" working hours.
abc@brl-tgr.ARPA (Brint Cooper ) (05/19/84)
I had this very problem; it took a couple of hours (2-3). On brl-tgr I set up a 1-line .newsrc with options -n and the "foo.all" lines. Then I spent the rest of the time with my right index finger on the "n" key. It's not elegant but it works!
davecl@mako.UUCP (05/20/84)
If subscription files were based on dates instead of article numbers the problem of having to rebuild news subscription files when changing hosts wouldn't come up. dgc