In article <0kNzzUmo3cEN092yn@mcs.com>, bobr@mcs.com (Robert P. Rush) wrote:
>
>You're not going to cut down the download time by using multiple news
>servers. You're still going to be downloading everything, including
>duplicates from each server. Once you download them, Yarn will
>discard the duplicates.
That's what I would expect to happen. Online time here is at a
premium, anything over an average of 40 minutes per day (if every day
of the month) will incur extra charges. Usually I can get my download
packets in about 4 or 5 minutes. So an extra news server packet
shouldn't impact too much.
>If you're using multiple news servers, you need a separate .newsrc
>file for each server. Though, I believe you figured that out for
>yourself. I haven't looked at olmenu or omen to see how they handle
>multiple servers. From what you say about omen, I would assume that
>you'd have to specify the newsrc file yourself before running omen.
I've tried a few times - having two backup .newsrc files and copying
one of them back to .newsrc according to the news server I'd set in
the shell. It worked well once (I used news.uni-stuttgart.de), but
ever since I've not been able to connect with it. Our own news server
here is presently dead while undergoing an upgrade. It seems that it
wasn't quick enough to accept its feed from MCI. So I'm (and our
sysadmin also is) open to any and all suggestions for publicly
accessable news servers. Ability to post to them is not important.
>The newsrc is the only file used by uqwk that needs to be changed
>between servers. The other files you mentioned with rtin are probably
>used to pretty up the interface.
That's good to know, that it's only the one file that needs to be kept
track of. Our system now has a new version of oman (offline mail and
news) which will call the server from whatever we want to set in the
shell. The previous one only would use our local one. But we can't
find a good foreign news server to test it out on.
Thanks a lot for your input.
Brian
--
"Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one"
A.J. Leibling