Soon enough parts of Usenet were using the educational and governmental infrastructure, the ARPANet, for high-speed transfers. Thus to many people Usenet became synonymous with the "big network", the InterNet. But don't confuse the two in the presence of an armed or physically fit Usenet veteran. It would be as imprudent as mistaking a 1967 Harley with a Kawasaki in a company of Hell's Angels.
Usenet is the ultimate network anarchy, and the ultimate in network cooperation. Discussion groups such as "misc.pet.hairdo.french" or "alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork" can be created, and flooded with hundreds of articles overnight. But all that couldn't work without the good will and overtime of those who administer and manage computers exchanging the stuff. And it does work amazingly smoothly, given that the current daily flow of articles is measured in hundreds of megabytes.
One of the most important things is the written and unwritten etiquette. Many articles you will see will likely send your blood pressure soaring to record levels. Many discussions will make you have doubts about the human race, such as it is. Many topics will squarely stomp on your feelings and touch raw nerves. We will offer two main rules:
Unix utilities for reading Usenet news come in three flavors: classical
programs such as "rn" (and the much improved "trn"), which are text-based
and can be used from any terminal; more GUI-aware implementations, such
as "xrn"; and finally omnibus programs such as netscape, which
incorporate a news reader. Each of them has a million settings and
features, which we cannot describe in detail. Our preference happens to
be trn.
How to change the default newsserver?
The news client has to have a server to connect to and grab articles from
it. Since many newsgroups are in great demand for various reasons
(load placed on the computer because of the amount of traffic, or plain
censorship being two of them), most news servers won't let your computer
connect unless you are a part of the organization they serve.
In the past the Computer Science Department was providing us with access to some newsgroups. Soon, hopefully, the Academic Computing Services will start their own server for use by the rest of the campus and the students.
The Math Department has been running a news server for over a year now.
It has just been moved to a more reliable computer, and it carries more
groups than others on campus. Here's what to do if you want to try it
out. First, back up the file which
records the articles you've read with the following command:
cd ; cp .newsrc .newsrc.bakNow proceed depending on the news client you plan to use.
While you are at
it, you may want to make sure that mail preferences are also set
correctly. Mail server should be set to clinch. Close the
"Options" dialog.
Trn and rn
Both of these clients take their server setting from two places. One is
the default server specified by the administrator; it is currently set
to mp.cs.niu.edu, but will soon change to news (our
server).
The second place is the value of the "environment variable" NNTPSERVER. To see whether you have one set (and to what) type setenv at the Unix prompt. If you see this variable listed along with its value, it overrides the default choice mentioned above. You can assign a new value by adding the following line to the end of your .login file:
setenv NNTPSERVER newsYou should also make sure that this value is not altered in other configuration files, e.g. in your .cshrc or .tcshrc. The changes you make won't take effect until you log out and log back in, or until you do source ~/.login at the Unix prompt.
xrn.nntpServer: watsonIf it does, and you want to switch to our server, change the name to "news", or simply delete that line to let the system default take over. Again, the changes won't take effect until you restart X-Windows.