[news.software.anu-news] VMS anu-news problems

chuck@mitlns.mit.edu (01/12/90)

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I'm looking for some help getting NEWS going on our Vaxcluster running
VMS. I have gotton to products off the net and have problems with both.

  1. NEWS version 1.3, apparently from the University of Wisconson
     This is written in fortran and uses a remote server. It works
     pretty well, good speed in particular, but certain news letters
     cause it to crash which is a bummer, since it then forgets what
     you have read. It's really bad when the offending letter is cross-posted
     to many groups.  We are using it with Wollongong TCP on a uVax II.

  2. NEWS version 5.9c which I got from kuhub (Kansas State University).
    This I believe is "ANU"-NEWS? I'm waiting until I get it to
    work before registering since one unkown is which node to run on.

    I've been trying to get it to run on 2 separate machines, a uVax
    with WIN and a 6220 with CMUTCP. This (if it worked!) is clearly
    the nicer package.

     I want to start out with a remote server, until we learn more
     and we have a Unix site that lets us use them. But the problems
     now:

           It is always much slower than the first package.
	   Under WIN it sometimes works, if it has the lists
	   of titles it is not to bad. But when I try to use
           SKIM to update the problems start. It takes about
           10 minutes per group and usually fails, giving a 
	   "lost link to..." message. Updating 100 news-groups
            looks like it will take more than 24 hours.


           Under CMU I don't get as far. I can set up the news
	   groups with a SET NEWSGROUP/SERVER=/PROT=/INQUIRE
	   command, so the communication line works but I've 
	   never managed to Update the list of articles. I have
           managed to update on the WIN system, then run on
	   the CMU system, change the protocol and get messages.



   Any help would be appreciated! If possible please mail to me,
 my NEWS interface doesn't work reliably :-)

				Chuck Parsons
				Chuck@MITLNS.MIT.EDU
				CHUCK@MITLNS.BITNET

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