[comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc] News-reading on PC's...

abrams@cs.columbia.edu (Steven Abrams) (09/08/90)

OK, here's the situation:

We have a Novell PC network and are soon going to be getting a news
feed to one of our machines.  All machines (currently) run DOS, but
the Unix jump is forthcoming, if only for a few development systems.

I'd like some net.input on the best way to provide the feed for our
other workstations on the network.  

It currently appears that I'll be running Waffle or UUPC on the
workstation that gets the feed, but I haven't decided yet how to have
the other PC's read the news.  Also, I think that putting the news
right onto the file server might take up too much space.  We run a
package called Map-Assist which lets anyone on the network have access
to your local drive, though at somewhat of a performance loss.  This
would be sufficient for News, though, eh?

As far as news-reading software, does anything exist on the PC with
the functionality of rn or gnus?  Any comments on how difficult it
might be to convert gnus from e-lisp to, say, Epsilon's EEL language
(very C-like)?

Does any one know of software that can act as a UUCP gateway  for
SPECIFICALLY for Novell?  PC-networks in general?

Does anyone think that there might be a market for such a package,
i.e. a process that can run on the file-server that takes the
news/mail feed in, and does the appropriate things with it including
timeouts on files, reading a "spool" directory for posting news and
sending mail, etc...  I have all the related docs and info needed to
roll my own, but if one exists I'll gladly get it.

Finally, I'm looking for comments on how much disk space a news feed
can actually take up, if one gets a "decent" amount of newsgroups.

Thanks again for any help anyone can offer.

~~~Steve

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 *Steven Abrams             abrams@cs.columbia.edu
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