In article <raLazgHAAY0X092yn@y.z>,
hello-yarners@see.my.sig (Tim Myddletun) wrote:
>Thu, 1 May 1997 22:16:06 +0930 (CST),
>Jim Tucker <jtucker@light.iinet.net.au> wrote:
>>I can't understand the problem. Why would you want to post news when
>>you have no news to post? In any case if the news server (another
>>machine from the one you are logged into) is down it's down. Try again
>
>The original poster's problem is that they can't post EMAIL via Uqwk
>when the NTTP server is down... and he's correct. UQWK won't run even
>for Email when it can't open an NNTP connection. It's a dumb
>situation, but one of the foibles of Uqwk...
Yes, but it is an intentional foible! First of all, uqwk doesn't
readily know whether you are doing only mail replies, and while it
would be fairly easy to determine this up front for SOUP, uqwk handles
two other formats also. Uqwk (correctly in my opinion) takes the
conservative approach of making sure it can open the newsserver first
rather than blowing up on the first news post, leaving the whole replies
file only partially processed.
The other less obvious gotcha is that even mail-only reply packets could
contain To: UQWK messages telling it to subscribe to a newsgroup, for
which it needs the nntpserver to validate the group name.
That said, there are two workarouds...
First, before running uqwk set the NNTPSERVER var to a public server
such as news.uni-stuttgart.de.
Or compile the non-nntp flavor of uqwk (source at ftp.gte.com) which
doesn't suffer from this problem.