>That lack of a shell account is becoming less and less of an issue, now
>that I'm using Souper 95 to grab my mail and news, though...
>
>Anyway...to my question. What would I need to do to try to access the
>news server on Mindspring while I'm connected to America.Net? Is that
>even possible? Or would I have to connect to Mindspring to access their
>news server? Would it perhaps be possible to pull news from both
>servers, one after the other, and then let Yarn reject the duplicates?
You would have to connect to Mindspring directly to pull the second
set of news; unless you can convince them to set you up with a
special arrangement. I would suspect you won't be able to, this is
the sort of thing spammers like to do and AFAIR Mindspring run a
tight ship.
I grab news from three different servers.
My main isp (zetnet) pre-packs news in a proprietry format for
zmodem download, for which I have hacked up a Perl script to convert
into minimalist soup packets. This is fast and cheap here in a
land where local phone calls are by the second metered [and shell
accounts are virtually non-existent], plus engaged tones are
pretty much unknown, plus they are local, plus the feed is
normally extremely good.
However the feed _is_ prone to going on strike for a week or so
every few months, and every nine months or so they tend to fall
into a plague of technical problems.
I just do an import -u on the output of my Perl script, to pull
these articles in.
My backup isp (dircon) consistently drops a fair proportion of
articles but has never been down in my experience. I have to
dial into them seperately to access their server, I use a
fairly standard souper95 setup to grab articles from them via
nntp. This is less fast and thus less cheap. I have a
reduced set of groups in the newsrc for the occasions when I
need to pull news from them.
[dircon do have shell accounts available, but the news-feed isn't
good enough, and I don't use it often enough, for me to bother
given that I mainly use them to back up tcp/ip connectivity]
import -u on these and letting yarn sort out the duplicates works
well.
Finally to ensure that I always receive _something_ in the _one_
group I really, really, must have (-; I'm subscribed to a news
service (zippo) in the USA, which requires authorisation with
a username and password. Since this goes over the transatlantic
link, this is usually slow and subject to the vagaries of whether
you USAians are awake or asleep, I only pull in the one group from
them.
I have an alternative newsrc file for them, which I use with
the souper95 -N switch. I also have a NEWSAUTH file in my home
directory holding my usernames and passwords for them.
Again letting yarn sort out any duplicates appears to work fine.
An important point to note is that if you are pulling news
from multiple servers using souper, you must always pull the
news from _all_ the servers or remember to do a catch-up
regularly. Otherwise unread articles will pile up on the
server your not pulling news from, and you'll wind up with
the souper session from hell when you next touch that server.
Also note that you may have problems with articles you have
expired re-appearing because you've pulled another copy from a
different server. This happens when you expire aggressively
and/or where news propogation is particularly poor.
HTH!
-- Kapusniak, Stefan m