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It transfers news (usenet netnews) by pretending to read it and then shoving what it gets to another server.
It does all the news transfering with NNTP.
On systems that support XHDR, it is fairly efficient.
It creates and deletes news groups using ctlinnd, so it works best on systems that use INN.
Current status: abandoned
Last modification: 2002
Download: here
FNEWS(1) FNEWS(1)
FNEWS
fnews - pull news that people actually read via nntp
SYNOPSIS
fnews [-newsrc] [-fetch] [-nnrpd] [-force days] [-debug] [-verbose]
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[-config config file] [PARAMETER=value]...
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DESCRIPTION
Fnews will use the NNTP to transfer news between two news servers. It
only transfers the news that it believes people will want to read. It
knows what people want to read by looking at their fetched.
Unlike some other similar programs, fnews will keep track of article
numbers rather than using the newnews command. This is important
because with most news implementations the newnews command thrahes the
server.
Fnews runs in three passes. The first pass (-nnrpd) is optional. It
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looks for files that have been touched by nnrpd when groups have been
accessed. The result of this pass is stored in the file $STATE/nnr-
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pdlist for later processing by the -newsrc pass. The patch to nnrpd
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(version inn1.4unoff4) can be found at the end of the fnews file.
The second pass (-newsrc) is required. During this pass .newsrc files
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are examined. The result of this pass is a file, $STATE/fetchlist,
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that describes which groups to fetch and how many articles to grab in
each one.
The last pass (-fetch) actually goes and gets the articles.
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OPTIONS
There are only a few command line options to fnews, but there are many
configuration options. Since fnews is a perl program distributed in
source, the bulk of the configuration options are specified in the pro-
gram text itself just after the copyright notice. You do not need to
change them there though: one of the parmateters, $CONFIG, is the loca-
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tion of a file to require before doing much else. This file will be
read before much else is evaluated. Set your overrides there. The
name of this file can be specified on the command line with -config
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filename.
The other options are -force days which will override the touch files
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and cause days worth of news to be transfered. You can get more ver-
bose output by specifying -verbose, or -debug.
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Finally, any of the configuration parameters (see the source) can be
overriden on the command line with an assigment: command=value.
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NEWS SERVER SETUP
fnews is asymetrical in how it talks to news servers. It talks to the
news server that it is transfering news from as if it were a news
reader. It talks to the server that it is transfering news to as if it
were another news server. This difference can make configuration
annoying. However, it's easy to test: if you can read news with a news
reader, you can get the news with fnews (if you don't have permission,
just use a packet forwarder).
One implication is that with fnews, you tend get your news from one
server and send your outgoing news to another.
USE WITH SLOW LINKS
I built fnews mostly to optimize use of my old slow (SLIP) internet
connection. It saved my line by only transfering the news that is
likely to be read. In addition, I used a small tcp socket forwarder
process to introduce delay. In my forwarded process, I have it use a
small (128-byte) socket send buffer so that a round-trip delay is
required for every packet. To get my socket forwarder, ftp
ftp://ftp.idiom.com/pub/muir-programs/tcp nest.c.
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AVAILABILITY
The latest version of fnews is available through anonymous ftp:
ftp://ftp.idiom.com/users/muir/CPAN/programs/fnews.
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AUTHOR
David Muir Sharnoff
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Edition March 11, 1993 FNEWS(1)