BULLETIN has the capability to read and post messages to USENET NEWS in a client mode. News groups can also be stored on disk. Selected groups or set of groups which are commonly read can be selected to be stored, thus making reading of such groups much faster than having to access them over a network. Note that since the number of groups is well over 2000 makes it unreasonable at most sites to store them all. BULLETIN (actually BULLCP) can act as as a gateway between decnet and tcp for NEWS, which allows decnet nodes without tcp access to be able to access a tcp news server. This method does not require spawning any processes, since the detached process BULLCP is always present, so the access is very fast. Since BULLETIN uses a shared database to store info on the NEWS groups and periodically updates it, there is no need for that to be done when a user accesses the NEWS groups. Several other NEWS readers do this when you run them, which is why they take a long time to start up. It is also possible to feed NEWS groups into a "real" BULLETIN folder. Presently, BULLETIN can be used with either UCX, MULTINET, or CMU TCP/IP packages (and of course DECNET) for reading NEWS. Support for other packages can be added if I can find sites willing to beta test the interface for me. The source for the TCP interface is in C rather than FORTRAN because the MULTINET include files are in C. The instructions for installation are as follows. Define BULL_NEWS_SERVER to be a system logical name pointing to either your internet or decnet NEWS node. If it is decnet, simply specify the decnet node name, i.e. $ DEFINE/SYSTEM BULL_NEWS_SERVER NERUS BULLETIN decides to use DECNET rather than TCP access based on the node name. If it does not have any periods in it, then it assumes it is a DECNET node. If you have a cluster where one node is an internet node, and the rest non-internet nodes, you'll have to create a startup procedure that defines BULL_NEWS_SERVER to be the internet news server address only on the node (or nodes) on the cluster that have actually internet access. The other nodes will have BULL_NEWS_SERVER defined as the decnet node name that BULLCP is running on in the cluster. (Of course, BULLCP will have to be running on a node with internet access.) NOTE: If you want to disable the DECNET gateway feature, then before starting BULLCP, define the logical name: $ DEFINE/SYSTEM BULL_NO_NEWS_GATEWAY "TRUE" Defining this will only shut off the gateway. BULLETIN will still be allowed to read NEWS from the local node as long as BULL_NEWS_SERVER is defined. If you want to enable the TCP gateway, you must define BULL_TCP_NEWS_GATEWAY (NOTE: This presently only works with MULTINET, and you must have UCX emulation enabled, i.e. enable UCXQIO from the SCU and do a SET LOAD-UCX-DRIVER TRUE from the NCU.) Where this feature is useful is to allow an ip node access to a news server which it does not have permission to do so directly. $ DEFINE/SYSTEM BULL_TCP_NEWS_GATEWAY "TRUE" BULL_TCP_NEWS_GATEWAY can be defined to point to a file name which contains ip names that are allowed access. The file should contain real ip names. Blank lines and comments (preceded by #) are allowed. If you want a whole domain to be allowed, specify the domain preceded by a ., i.e. .pfc.mit.edu . You can also specify that BULLCP is ONLY to act as a NEWS gateway. This is to allow adding the news gateway to an site that you have DECNET access to, but which does not want to make use of any of the other BULLETIN features. You would specify the following command before starting BULLCP: $ DEFINE/SYSTEM BULL_NEWS_GATEWAY_ONLY "TRUE" In order to post messages, BULLETIN needs to know the internet nodename of the local host. This is done automatically for nodes running MULTINET. For other nodes, BULLETIN attempts to translate the logical name ARPANET_HOST_NAME, INTERNET_HOST_NAME, and MX_NODE_NAME. If you are on a DECNET node that is not on INTERNET (and is not part of a cluster which has an INTERNET address), but you are accessing NEWS via DECNET, you can specify the hostname as follows: $ DEFINE/SYSTEM INTERNET_HOST_NAME "%localhost@internet-address" Where "localhost" is your local decnet hostname, and "internet-address" is the internet address of the gateway node. The local time zone is detected by looking at the following logical names: LISP$TIME_ZONE, MULTINET_TIMEZONE, or PMDF_TIMEZONE. (LISP$TIME_ZONE is defined if you have LISP installed.) The name of the organization is included in the header of the NEWS message. This can be anything, but usually is the company or university name. This can be hardcoded into the source by putting in BULLNEWS.INC, or by defining the system logical name BULL_NEWS_ORGANIZATION. The name of the mail protocol to use for responding by mail to NEWS messages can also be either hardcoded by putting in BULLNEWS.INC, or by defining the system logical name BULL_NEWS_MAILER. After installing the new BULLETIN, execute the command NEWS, which asks for a list of all the news groups. Because this is the first time it is executed, it will cause a load of all the remote news groups into a local data base (BULL_DIR:BULLNEWS.DAT). This will take several minutes to do. It is the only time that this load will be done interactively. Afterwards, BULLCP will periodically update the data base. BULLCP will update NEWS every hour. If you want to change this frequency, define the logical name BULL_NEWS_UPDATE to the number of minutes in between updates, i.e. DEFINE/SYSTEM BULL_NEWS_UPDATE "30" for 30 minutes. NOTE: BULLCP will create a subprocess BULLCP NEWS which does the update. You can watch how long it takes for this to run in order to determine if you want to change the update period). If you ever want to force NEWS to be updated, simply restart BULLCP. It is suggested that you run OPTIMIZE_RMS.COM on BULLNEWS.DAT, as it will cause the file to be compressed and will allow updates to run much faster (factor of 5 or more). Never delete BULLNEWS.DAT. There is no reason to ever do so, and it will cause subscribed users to be subscribed to the wrong news groups. WARNING: One user discovered that his server (using bnews?) had a bug which caused the updates to cause bogus "new messages" notifications for subscribed NEWS group when entering BULLETIN. If you experience this problem, try defining the system logical name BULL_SPECIAL_NEWS_UPDATE. This will cause the update to use a different algorithm which should eliminate the problem, although it requires much more time to execute. News groups can be specified as being stored on disk via the SET NEWS command. See the online help for more info. After converting such groups, when BULLCP wakes up, it will start the storing process. This can take a long time if you have a lot of groups. An index file pointing to the stored messages is created and called BULL_DIR:BULLNEWSDIR.DAT. After the storage process is complete you should consider running OPTIMIZE_RMS.COM on it (and anytime after you convert a sizable amount of groups). It is possible to automatically have news messages to be fed into a real folder. Place the name of the news group into the folder description surrounded by <>, i.e. . It must be in lower case. (Other text is allowed in the description, i.e. "THIS IS A TEST FOLDER ".) BULLETIN is set up so that when a person replies to a message and extract the original message into the reply message, it uses the idention string "->" for the extracted text. The reason for this rather than ">" is that some news servers won't allow messages which have more extracted text than new text and test for ">". If you want to change that, then change the default strings for all the INDENT qualifier line in the file BULLCOM.CLD before compiling. If you have any problems or questions, please let me know. MRL P.s. If you do not know what USENET NEWS, it's basically news messages which are passed between nodes. Originally it was limited to USENET, but that is no longer the case. Unlike internet mailing lists which use MAIL to send the messages to individuals, NEWS messages are not sent via MAIL. They are passed between nodes using a special protocol, NNTP. Users must use a NEWS reader package to read them. However, it is possible to read NEWS remotely over a network, and therefore avoiding having to actually store the messages. BULLETIN is setup to be used mainly in this client mode, i.e. it can read messages on another node via TCP or DECNET. This is useful, since the number of NEWS groups total over 1000, the disk space required for storage is very high. If you are interested in finding a server node that would allow you to read NEWS, and do not know of one (i.e. a USENET node), I know of no official way of doing so. However, one suggestion was to try connecting to FTP.UU.NET via ANONYMOUS FTP and look through the directory uumap or uunet-sites to find a USENET node near you to contact.