dsill@ark1.nswc.navy.mil (Dave Sill) (07/13/89)
Background: I'm new to news, as a reader/poster and as an administrator. I've recently brought up news and nntp on a 4.3 BSD. I've got things nominally working; we have three feeds and have successfully posted news. Now for the questions. 1. Which news software should I be using? Currently I've got B news version 2.10.3 beta 3/19/86. I know this isn't the latest, but it's what comes with 4.3. Should I use the latest version, and where can I get it? Should I use C news? 2. How does one maintain the "active" file? Do new groups get added automatically? If I want to manually add a group that should be there, or otherwise manually update it, is there any way to lock it while I'm editing? 3. What is the purpose of the fourth field in the "active" file? It seems to be either "y" or "m". 4. Why do readnews and vnews say "too many newsgroups"? Emacs' rnews doesn't have any problem. 5. Which Emacs news reader should I use? Ideally, I'd like to be able to follow threads, kill threads, skip cross-posted duplicates, update .newsrc without quiting, search for topics or keywords in groups I may not subscribe to, and easily subscribe to new groups, as well as the normal stuff rnews supports. 6. My "distributions" file is empty. I haven't found any documentation for it. What should it have? 7. I've gotten duplicate messages. Doesn't news recognize the message ID and ignore duplicates? 8. Is there any way to know whether one is receiving all messages posted to newsgroup? I miss knowing that if a message fails to reach our system, someone somewhere would be notified, as when mail to a mailing list fails. 9. How many feeds should one have? Surely one is too few and a hundred too many; but what's the optimal range? 10. The topic of most newsgroups is apparent from their names, but not always. Is there some master list that documents the groups? Thanks for your time. -- -Dave (dsill@relay.nswc.navy.mil)