Defining a News Server
To be able to read news, the Line Mode Browser (www)
needs the address of a news
server. This is a machine which runs the NNTP protocol. If you
already use internet news on your site, you will have one of
these. There are several ways you can tell wwwwhich news
server to use.
Note you may also have your machine enabled as being authorized to
pick up news from the news server by that server's system manager.
For a NeXT
The NeXT defaults are read, looking for a value for "NewsHost" for
application name "WorldWideWeb", then for a global default, then for
application named "News".
All other cases
On all other platforms (?) you can do one of the following in order to
define a news server.
Set an environment variable
You can set the environment variable NNTPSERVER to be the
internet address of the server. As a n example, you can do this in
your .login file, or your .cshrc file. (On VMS, use
a logical name, on VM/CMS, the CENV globalv table).
Use a file
The file /usr/local/lib/rn/server will be read if it exists
and no environment variable is defined. It should contain the single
line containing the name of the news server. This filename may be
overridden at compile time by defining the SERVER_FILE symbol to be
the quoted string.
At Compile Time
If you are installing www for several people, you can set the default
by defining the variable DEFAULT_NEWS_HOST to be the quoted
string of the server name on the command line for the compilation of
the HTNews.c module For example, use the option (check your own
compiler's command line syntax)
-DDEFAULT_NEWS_HOST="mynewshost.domain"
Use a domain name alias
If no other default news host is found, the software looks for a
machine with name or alias "news" in the local domain. If your domain
has a single news server which you would like to use as a default, and
the person in charge of the domain name registration agrees, then make
an alias "news" for the server. This will have the management
advantage that the administration can move the news server without any
trouble later.
Tim BL