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printer-version

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The ordinary german internetuser cannot read news online. The data comes very slowly through the line and you make the telecom a present.
The Mickysoft-version of Netscape gives you the special opportunity of writing and reading the news offline and sending everything at once. Did they forget this in the Linux-version?
NO! You do not need this function.
You build your own news-server and read the news from your computer instead.

The news-server is usually installed. You just need a program to download the news.
This is suck´s job. This program downloads all news from the news-groups you want. It delivers these up to the local news-server and you can read them from there.

You enter all wished news-groups in the file sucknewsrc.
Before starting the first time the file should look like this:
 

You just enter the name of the news-group and after this a number. If this is a negative number suck will know that it has to download exactly this amount of news from this group. After downloading the news the number in the sucknewsrc will be replaced with the last downloaded news-number. With this change suck will know the next time where it stopped and will continue from this point.
 

Right after this you have to adapt the script get.news.rnews (or innxmit) for your own system. Suck gets the information out of this file where it finds the components of your news-system:
Spool, executable programs and the name of the news-server where you get your news from have to be changed.

For example here my own  configuration-file .
(for SUSE 5.2 and 5.3, not 6.0. See next issue!)

The next two steps concern the local news-server-configuration. In order to use the news with your own news-server the news-groups have to be notified.
Therefore the command addgroup exists.
 

Attention: during configuring the news-server you should be logged in as the user "news" because there could be problems with the owner-rights later. First log in with 

su news

/usr/lib/news/bin/maint 

addgroup groupname y|n|m [=realgroup]

• y -- You are allowed to post in this news-group
• n -- You have no rights to post in this news-group and may read only
• m -- this group is a moderated group

The option [=realgroup] offers you the possibility to run the news-group with a different name at you local computer.

The next configuration affects the file /var/lib/news/sys. There you enter which local written news will be send otherwise nobody is able to read the composed news.
Usually the file is in "save mode" that means no news will get outside. That´s why you change the file to:
 

Finally you have to create the directory where the news-server creates the list of all news it has to send. Therefore you make the directory

mkdir /var/spool/news/
  outgoing/news.uni-hamburg.de

The offline news-system should run independently now.

(Of course you are able to change news.uni-hamburg.de to the news-server of your choice - this is recommended because this server is extremly slow.)