Re: [Noffle-users] Noffle with tin

[Jim H. <jim...@ac...>]

On 01-Jul-2004 Balas Mark wrote:
> I am using tin for reading news and I tried to use it with noffle. I 
> successfully configured noffle to download some articles from a newsgroup I 
> regulary read (in "full" mode) and saved them in /var/spool/noffle.
> 
> I tried to configure tin to use this spool: I changed spool dir 
> /etc/tin/tin.defaults to the directory mentioned above, but tin does not 
> seem to recognise the articles or the group.

Short explanation:

You need to use 'tin -r' or 'rtin' with Noffle, and either put the name of the
machine running Noffle in /etc/nntpserver or in an environment variable
NNTPSERVER. In your case, Noffle is on the same machine as tin, so 'localhost'
as the machine name is fine. Try this:

$ export NNTPSERVER=localhost
$ tin -r

Longer explanation (apologies if you know all this):

The 'traditional' way in which news servers store the articles they receive is
in a file system hierarchy under /var/spool/news. For example, article 255 in
comp.lang.c would be in a file with path 'comp/lang/c/255'. News reading
programs would read directly from these files. This is what tin is trying to do
on your system.

This traditional storage has its good points, but is not very good if the news
reading program is on a different machine to the news server. So a protocol,
NNTP, is used to communicate between readers and servers (and between servers).
Once you're using NNTP, you don't have to use the traditional spool storage.
Noffle's original author decided to keep articles in a database-like file
instead, which is why Noffle uses /var/spool/noffle and not /var/spool/news;
/var/spool/noffle doesn't have the structure expected under /var/spool/news. So
to use Noffle, you have to use NNTP.

-- 
Jim Hague - jim...@ac...          Never trust a computer you can't lift.