University of California at Berkeley Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences Instructional & Electronics Support /share/b/pub/news.help Using the USENET Network News Facility ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Feb 7 2014 CONTENTS: NOTICE: USENET has been retired at UCB Overview USENET Policies and Procedures Etiquette CSUA News Server Other News Servers (Google, etc) Netscape WEB-Based News Reader UNIX text-based News Readers ("rn", "nn", "Pnews", .newsrc file) Using PINE to read news Accessing ucb.* Newsgroups from Off-Campus Posting to ucb.* newsgroups via email Digests of Articles in Class Newsgroups from Previous semesters Posting news articles from the command line Canceling an article you have posted NOTICE: USENET has been retired at UCB ------------------------------------------- The USENET worldwide distributed text-based Internet discussion system was widely used on campus until about 2010. Currrently, there are no active USENET servers on campus. The information below if largely historical. The campus-wide USENET newsgroup service on agate.berkeley.edu ended after the Fall 2008 semester. Until 2011, the CSUA (http://csua.berkeley.edu) student organization hosted a USENET server on news.csua.berkeley.edu just for ucb.* newsgroups used by EECS classes. For current information about alternatives, please see http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/connecting.html#news. Overview -------- The USENET news facility is a network-based utility for reading and posting messages ("articles") related to specific topics ("newsgroups"). There are a series of news servers on computers all over the world. The servers pass articles for selected newsgroups and hold them for a while. You can read and post to a news server using WEB-based programs (Netscape Communicator, Outlook Express) and UNIX command-line programs ("rn", "xrn", "nn", "Pnews"). For more information, please see the newsgroup news.announce.newusers You can access that from Netscape using the URL news://news.berkeley.edu/news.announce.newusers On UNIX systems, You tell the news reader which server to use by setting the NNTPSERVER environment variable, for example: setenv NNTPSERVER news.berkeley.edu Your .newsrc file is specific to the server you use, so if you change servers you *will* need to change your .newsrc files too (see below). USENET Policies and Procedures ------------------------------ Summary: - Postings must be appropriate to the topic of the newsgroup. - Postings must not be obscene, racist or generally offensive. - Postings of advertisements must be confined to the biz.* groups. - "Excessive" crossposts are rejected by news.berkeley.edu to avoid spam. So don't post to more than 5 newsgroups at a time. - If the same message is posted more than 2 or 3 times, it may also be rejected; it triggers an Excessive Multi-Post (EMP) filter. For more policy and usage information, please refer to the articles under: http://www.net.berkeley.edu/dcns/usenet/ Etiquette --------- The news articles you post may be read by anyone. People who post are expected to follow accepted rules of behavior - no obscenities, no offensive remarks of a racial or sexual nature. The University is bound by the laws and policies that protect its members from insult and harassment and can not permit University facilities (ie the local news servers) to be used for such purposes. In general, the contents of articles posted to any news group should be appropriate to the subject of that group. Articles should be written so that no reader will be made to feel harassed, insulted or libeled by the contents. In some cases these offenses may be illegal, in others they may just be anti-social. The actions of any UCB user reflects on all of us, and so you are expected to maintain a professional attitude in your news postings. Class news groups, with names such as "ucb.class.ee1", are intended ONLY for announcements and discussions that are related to the course. Users should not post advertisements, jokes or derogatory messages to class news groups. Postings that advertise items or services for sale should be confined to the biz.* newsgroups. Some users must pay to receive USENET articles, and some newgroups are already very active. Users become very annoyed when commercial advertisements are forced on them. Certain news groups are more permissive than others, and users who choose to subsribe to them may encounter offensive material. These groups are easily identified by their names and are within the "alt" category. The USENET is not strictly regulated and newsgroups are maintained at each server at the discretion of the local administrators. CSUA News Server ---------------- From about January 2009 through May 2011, The CSUA generously volunteered to host a USENET server just for the ucb.* newsgroups (including the EECS class newsgroups). The server name was "news.csua.berkeley.edu". How to read and post to the newsgroups on "news.csua.berkeley.edu": 1) Use the EECS Instructional WebNews client. This can be accessed from anywhere using an EECS Instructional UNIX account. (http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/webnews). 2) Use a WEB client such as Thunderbird or a text-based client such as pine. No logon is required for access from computers on UCB campus subnets, AirBears2 and the UCB VPN. A shared logon (username=usenet, password=gobears) is required for access from off-campus, to discourage spammers. You can include a link to a class newsgroup in a WEB page with this HTML code (using "cs152" as an example): CS152 Newsgroup Other News Servers (Google, etc) ------------------------------- News articles from the UCB server will propagate to other USENET servers such as Google (http://news.google.com) by default. This is sometimes convenient, but there are 2 problems to consider: - the articles on external servers don't expire at the end of a semester - spammers can collect email addresses from articles on external servers If you are posting to the campus news server ("news.berkeley.edu"), you can stop your article from going to external servers if you put a "Distribution: local" or "Distribution: ucb" (or ucb-local) header in your news posting. Netscape WEB-Based News Reader ------------------------------ Netscape has built-in facilties for reading and posting network news. In various versions of Netscape, the facilities are called "News", "Collabra" or "Messenger". The "help" buttons in Netscape explain how to use it. Here are the steps for using Netscape Messenger v 4.61: Set the news server: - from the "Edit" menu, left-click on "Preferences" - left-click on "Mail & Newsgroups" - left-click on "Newsgroup Servers" - enter "news.berkeley.edu" - left-click on "OK" Set the newsgroups: - from the "Communicator" menu, left-click on "Messenger" - right-click on "news.berkeley.edu", select "Subscribe..." - it'll take a few minutes to download the list of available newsgroups - under "All', you can scroll and select the newsgroups you want to read - OR, under "New" you can type in he newsgroups you want to read - left-click on "OK" Post to a newsgroup: - from the "Communicator" menu, select "Messenger" - list your newsgroups by left-clicking on "news.berkeley.edu" if needed - left-click on the group you want to post to - left-click on the "New Msg" button - type the message, etc and "Send" it Read from a newsgroup: - from the "Communicator" menu, select "Messenger" - list your newsgroups by left-clicking on "news.berkeley.edu" if needed - left-click on the group you want to read - if there are any, subjects and messages will appear in the other frames UNIX text-based News Readers ("rn", "nn", "Pnews", .newsrc file) ---------------------------------------------------------------- rn is a simple text-based UNIX news reader. It displays one article at a time, allowing you to read it and giving you options to reply and/or save it to a file. It will save the article in a subdirectory called ~/News. Sometimes you will see the message "Checking active list for new newsgroups...". If you are in a hurry and rn is taking too long to do this, you can just hit Ctrl-C, and rn will allow you to read news immediately. However, if there are new newsgroups, you wont find out about them this way. See "man rn" for details. nn is the best text-based news reader to use on EECS Instructional UNIX systems. It uses your .newsrc and "setenv NNTPSERVER news.berkeley.edu" variable just as "rn" does. But when you type "nn", you get a full screen of subject lines for the first newsgroup. If the list is longer than one screen, you hit to continue. You can select articles individually for reading, and it starts displaying the selected articles after you've seen all the choices for one group. By default it displays only the article, although you can also display the header. After reading, saving and/or replying to the articles from one group, the sequence starts again with the full screen of subject lines from the next news group. It will save the article in a subdirectory called ~/News. You can get on-line help ("?") and quit at any time ("Q"). There are *many* features and options, and some huge man pages - start with "man nn". (This one is 78 pages long!) You can install an "init" file to set up options for "nn". There is a default one in /usr/local/nn.lib/init that you can copy to ~/.nn/init. The greatest benefit is the ease of browsing and *not* having to read the majority of articles. You can usually tell just from the subject or author whether or not you are interested. And "nn" reduces network traffic by delivering only the articles you request. If you are all caught up on reading new articles, "nn" just displays: "No News (is good news)" See "man nn" for details. trn is an menu-based news reader and posting utility on UNIX systems. See "man trn" for details. xrn is an X-Winodows based article posting utility on UNIX systems. See "man xrn" for details. tin is an menu-driven text-based article posting utility on UNIX systems. See "man tin" for details. The .newsrc file is used by the UNIX news readers to control what newsgroups you see and don't see. It also records which articles you have seen. Normally you don't need to know that this file even exists, but sometimes it is convenient to edit it manually (using "vi" or "emacs"). Each line lists a newsgroup and ends in a "!" or ":". The "!" means that you will not see any articles from this newsgroup, the ":" means you are subscribed to the newsgroup, and the numbers to right indicate which articles you have previously read. If a newsgroup exists, but is not listed in your .newsrc, you will be asked if you want to subscribe to it next time you read news. See also "man newsrc". Using PINE to read news ----------------------- If you are a regular user of PINE and you would like to use PINE to read news, you can edit your .pinerc file directly to enable access to the UCB news server: 1) Change the "nntp-server=" line in your ~/.pinerc to be: nntp-server=news.berkeley.edu 2) Change the "folder-collections line in your ~/.pinerc to be: folder-collections=mail/[], news {news.berkeley.edu:119/service=NNTP}#news.[] This tells pine the name of the news server and adds a collection in your FOLDER LIST called "news". Here's how to use the PINE Setup feature to enable newsgroups: Start from the PINE main menu -> Hit S for SETUP - Configure Pine Options -> Hit L for collectionList -> Hit A to add collection Specify these parameters: Nickname : News Server : news.berkeley.edu/service=NNTP Path : <-- blank View : <-- blank Hit ^X to Exit/save. Hit Y for Yes to save changes Hit E to Exit setup. Now, to view newsgroups: Start from the PINE main menu -> L for FOLDER LIST - Select a folder to view -> N for News groups on news.berkeley.edu/service=NNTP -> [Return] to View collection -> A to Add a newsgroup At the prompt Enter newsgroup name (or partial name to get a list): you should type the newsgroup name (ucb.class.cs170 for example) and hit Return. Accessing ucb.* Newsgroups from Off-Campus ------------------------------------------ Access the news.berkeley.edu news server is restricted to computers that are on UC Berkeley computers unless you use an campus proxy service for this. Two proxy services are available to EECS students: http://www.net.berkeley.edu/usenet/aus/ uses CalNet ID for authentication, for all UCB students. http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/webnews uses EECS Instructional UNIX account for authentication, for students in EECS classes who do not have SID numbers. Please see http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/connecting.html#news for details about how to use these and other methods to read news from off-campus. Posting to ucb.* newsgroups via email ------------------------------------- *** Nov 2007: THIS SERVICE WILL BE DISCONTINUED AFTER DEC 21, 2007. IT HAS *** BECOME A SOURCE OF SPAM TO THE NEWSGROUPS. Users will still be able to *** post to the UCB newsgroups at news.berkeley.edu without a password from *** any computer on an UCB network. Off campus users can post to UCB *** newsgroups at http://www.net.berkeley.edu/usenet/aus/ after logging in *** there with their CalNet IDs. A service was created in July 1994 that allows a news article to be posted to ucb.* newsgroups by sending the article in email to news.berkeley.edu. The recipient user name is the name of the newsgroup with the periods (`.') converted to dashes (`-'). Note that this works ONLY for newsgroups with names that start with "ucb". Examples: to post to the newsgroup: send the article to: -------------------------- ------------------------------------- ucb.test ucb-test@news.berkeley.edu ucb.ee.undergrad ucb-ee-undergrad@news.berkeley.edu ucb.cs.grad ucb-cs-grad@news.berkeley.edu ucb.class.cs61a ucb-class-cs61a@news.berkeley.edu Note that if you wish to post the same message to more than one newsgroup using email, you have to send it as an individual message to each newsgroup. This is because the the related mail server attempts to prevent loops and spamming by checking for duplicate posts. So you can either send multiple messages or use a USENET client (Netscape Messenger, tin, etc) instead of email to cross-post. Digests of Articles in Class Newsgroups from Previous semesters --------------------------------------------------------------- Digests of previous articles for EECS class newsgroups are available via anonymous ftp to news.Berkeley.EDU, within in the directory /pub/ucb.class. Here is an example of how to copy a digest to your machine using anonymous ftp: % ftp ftp.net.berkeley.edu Name: ftp Password: ftp> cd usenet/ucb.class-archives ftp> ls ftp> cd fa00 ftp> mget ucb.class.c9a* ftp> quit Before August 1993, news digests and an old nn server were available on Pasteur in a filesystem called /home/pasteur/news. The /home/pasteur/news filesystems has been removed from service, as 'News' is now providing both the digests and the nn server. Posting news articles from the command line -------------------------------------------- You can use the "Pnews" program to post a news article from the UNIX command line. If you want to post to ucb.test, for example, you would type: % Pnews ucb.test Pnews has a subtle interaction with Emacs and SSH X11 forwarding: You may get an error such as " Fatal error (11)./usr/sww/bin/Pnews: 20982 Memory fault" when trying to compose or edit a message. This error message occurs when you tell your SSH client to forward X11 connections, but you don't have an X server running on your client. At that point, if you try to start emacs (without the "-nw" option for "no windows"), emacs will return an error code to Pnews, which produces this unhelpful error message. The workaround is to run the following commands before attempting to post a message: setenv VISUAL "emacs -nw" setenv EDITOR "emacs -nw" or to start an X server (e.g. Exceed) on your client. Canceling an article you have posted ------------------------------------ You can cancel an article that you previously posted by using the "C" command within "rn". Note that you must do this on the same machine from which you posted the article, because the news server uses that information to identify you. The news servers process requests in batch, so the cancellation will not take effect immediately. Also, if your article has spread to other USENET servers off campus, there is no guarantee that all the servers will cancel the article. So when posting, it is best to assume that the contents may be read by everyone and may not be retrievable. EECS Instructional Support 378/384//386 Cory, 333 Soda inst@eecs.berkeley.edu