ka (12/04/82)
Scott Orshan recently proposed a system for making old netnews
articles available (Distributed archiving of netnews,
u1100a.251). Since his proposal will require some time to imple-
ment, I have written a very simple archiving system. Experience
with this system should be useful in designing a more sophisti-
cated archiving system later.
I have written two programs for accessing the the archive, both
of which work by sending mail to spanky!netar. "Getar article-
id" causes the article with the given article id to be mailed to
the requester. "Lsar newsgroup" lists the titles and article
id's of all the articles in the newsgroup. These routines will
be posted to net.sources under the title "Programs for accessing
archived news articles"
Currently I archive everything rather than attempting to predict
which articles people will want to access. I will log all ar-
chive requests and post a summary to net.news in a few months.
Anyone may access articles in fa.all, net.all and nj.all; but ac-
cess to news items appearing in bell.all, btl.all, and ho.all is
restricted to systems in Bell Labs which are known to spanky's
uucp program. At the moment this list includes very few
machines, but I will be glad to add more on request.
I will wait a few weeks to allow some back articles to accumulate
in the archive and then post a condensed version of this an-
nouncement to net.general.
Kenneth Almquist