How to get news from other sites onto your system ------------------------------------------------- You'll need to find a site that can feed you news through your NNTP daemon automatically. You will have to be added to their sys distribution list. You'll also want them to add you to their NNTPd access list as being able to feed them news (i.e. through IHAVE) If you can't do that, there are two options, both with inherent weaknesses: 1) NNTPxfer, by Michael B. Smith. A nice stand alone program which will retrieve articles from another system and attempt to store them in their proper newsgroups. Also updates your active file automatically. Unfortunately, this program just mirrors the article numbers from another site, which is what we DON'T want. We have our own article numbers. and this program would trash our pointers and any posts we receive. It also does not accept NEWNEWS commands, or use the history database, and doesn't make use of the NEXT command very efficiently. Someone would have to be very creative and write a program to make this option viable. If the source code were available, I might be tempted to work this one through. NNTPxfer is available in IU-1.4-amitcp.lha on aminet. *NOTE* This archive also contains NNTPpost, which I am tempted to use to broadcast the posts NNTPd receives. It, however, does not seem to queue posts if the destination server is uunavailable. 2) Michael van Elst wrote nntpget, which is available on aminet as nntpget.lha. It has all the features we need to properly retrieve articles from another system, and uses the history database. A very nice port. For some reason, though, it seems to have some forbid/permit or interrupt fetish and is horribly slow in my opinion compared to NNTPxfer, which also has its faults. It DOES create files in rnews format which Relaynews can use to properly file articles in their proper locations, and does not trash our pointers. For those of you who have superfast net connections, this is the best alternative, if you don't mind the jerkyness of your system during transfer. If you have a slow connection (i.e. 28800 or less), have a small number of newsgroups or you'll never get caught up to the most recent articles. I would also be tempted to make this run better with my daemon if the source were available.