[Pan-users] Re: Newsfeed

[Duncan]

Beartooth <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Sun, 22 Mar 2009
14:47:40 +0000:

>> You might try www.motzarella.org.  I like them.
> 
>       Hmmm... I don't see Gmane, nor grc, nor va in their list of
> hierarchies; does that mean trouble?

No, no trouble, because those aren't publicly distributed news feeds -- 
you have to get them from whatever private "news" server.  ("News" is in 
quotes there since it's not news in the normal/public/USENET sense.)

>       Incidentally, what I found said specifically that Comcast does
> not provide "Usenet." Searching comcast.net gets a long list of what I
> guess are feeds; but what I don't see is any indication whether comcast
> provides any feeds other than usenet. And I can't really tell yet what,
> if anything, I'm getting from whom.
> 
>       When I list six or eight newsservers in Pan, what determines how
> I actually get to them? Am I getting news.gmane.org, for instance,
> through comcast, or still through swva, or somehow directly, or what??

Once you setup a server in pan, it grabs the newsgroup list from that 
server, and automatically adds any new ones to the combined list of 
newsgroups.  When you visit a group, then, pan automatically checks all 
servers that carry that group for messages, then automatically grabs 
messages from whatever server they are on.

If all servers are ranked the same priority, it'll treat them the same 
when fetching messages.  If you have some set lower priority, it'll try 
the high priority ones first, only falling back to the others if the high 
priority servers don't have the message to download.

Since all the gmane groups, for instance, will only be on the gmane 
server, it'll only grab them from there.  Same, I expect, with the grc 
groups, etc, from the grc server only.  But if you have several normal 
USENET servers, proper USENET groups will probably appear on most or all 
of them and pan will simply "do the right thing" for downloads.

Uploads are somewhat different.  However, since you like things in small 
easy steps, I'd suggest setting up the new news server and verifying that 
you can download before you worry about posting at all.

When you have downloading working, setup at least one posting profile for 
each server you want to post to.  Presumably that means you'll have at 
least one profile each for gmane, grc, etc, since they're the only ones 
carrying those group, plus at least one for one of your normal USENET 
servers.  While you're setting up the profiles, be sure to select the 
server you want to post to for that profile.  Don't forget and leave it 
at the default or pan will give you a warning if you try to use a profile 
that posts to a server that doesn't carry that group.

Each posting profile is associated with a posting server.  By choosing 
that posting profile, you choose that server.  As I mentioned above, if 
that server doesn't have that particular group, pan will warn you and ask 
if you want to post anyway.  Just say no and choose the posting profile 
that you setup to use the correct server, above.

Note that pan will normally remember the posting profile you used for 
each group, so you should only have to choose the profile only the first 
time you post to each group, and pan will use that one after that.  The 
first post can be slightly confusing, however, if the profile pan uses by 
default isn't the one you intended to use and you forgot that you hadn't 
set it for that group yet.  Again, pan warns you if the server doesn't 
carry the group.  It's just that some people don't make the connection 
between posting profile and posting server right away.  That's why I've 
repeated it several different ways now. =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman