Very Computer

I currently have a slow speed internet connection and find that my favorite
news read nn does far too much reloading of news group information. It seems
that then entire list of newsgroups and current articles is downloaded at
each start-up, whenever I add a new news group, or even if I respond to a
post. I know that nn is one of the oldest console based news readers. Are
all of the others, such as tin or trn, equally wasteful of bandwidth?

Quote:

>I currently have a slow speed internet connection and find that my favorite
>news read nn does far too much reloading of news group information. It seems
>that then entire list of newsgroups and current articles is downloaded at
>each start-up, whenever I add a new news group, or even if I respond to a
>post. I know that nn is one of the oldest console based news readers. Are
>all of the others, such as tin or trn, equally wasteful of bandwidth?

Marc

Quote:

> I currently have a slow speed internet connection and find that my
> favorite news read nn does far too much reloading of news group
> information. It seems that then entire list of newsgroups and current
> articles is downloaded at each start-up, whenever I add a new news
> group, or even if I respond to a post. I know that nn is one of the
> oldest console based news readers. Are all of the others, such as tin
> or trn, equally wasteful of bandwidth?

--
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin /
http://www.brainbench.com     /  "He is a rhythmic movement of the
-----------------------------/    penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL

--

The speed improvement you will see comes from accessing the data only
once over the slowest link.  Some NNTP clients read all the header
information from the server every time they start up, which is really
painful on dial-up.  If you're using one of these, you will see a great
improvement because all the news is stored locally and the client can
get the headers right off your disk (or over Ethernet).

--
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin /
http://www.brainbench.com     /  "He is a rhythmic movement of the
-----------------------------/    penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL

- With Leafnode, this is controlled implicitly; when you use your
  newsreader to select a newsgroup, Leafnode notices this, and adds
  that group to the list it pulls for.

- With many other local news servers, you have to explicitly set up
  configuration in some files to indicate what newsgroups you want.

Either way, you pick the newsgroups you want.

Leafnode (and alternatives) make reading faster because they pull, all
at once, all the news for the newsgroups you planned to read; your
news reader can then access the data locally, at megabytes-per-second
speed rather than with mere (say) 28.8kbits/s speed.

This affects "time consumed" in two ways:

1.  Each article, as well as summary information, is locally
    accessible Very Fast, so that you don't have to go off and hit the
    ISP's news server each time.  Local access is probably 50x faster,
    of which a whopping lot of that time won't be terribly noticeable
    because you can't read that fast :-).

2.  Supposing you're using a dial-in line, with a local spool, you can
    hang up the phone whenever the spooler isn't pushing/pulling news.
    It would be unsurprising, for instance, to find that it takes 3
    minutes to download all the news that you'd read in a day.

    With the local spool, you only need to be dialed up for that 3
    minutes.

    Without the local spool, you need to be dialed up 100% of the time
    that you're reading news.  

    Whereas with a local spool, you might set up your system to pull
    down news at 3am, and need not care (since you're either asleep or
    out partying :-)) if a network problem causes the pull to take 7
    minutes instead of 3 minutes.

3. Reliability goes up.

   You don't have to _care_ what's going on vis-a-vis your network
   connections, so long as news gets pushed/pulled once in a while
   satisfactorily.

   If there's a slowdown due to heavy traffic (e.g. - you're
   downloading new Red Hat ISO images, updating Debian, or downloading
   episodes of Babylon 5) or due to something bad happening between
   you and your ISP, this doesn't affect the quality of your news
   service, as long as things haven't degraded _ridiculously_ badly.
--

http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/linuxxian.html
Rules of  the Evil  Overlord #28. "My  pet monster  will be kept  in a
secure cage  from which it  cannot escape and  into which I  could not
accidentally stumble." <http://www.eviloverlord.com/>

The local news server approach merely makes your *local* usage much quicker
(both for personal reading and replying to articles and for anyone else in
your home if you have a home LAN as an increasing number of people do) and
the drudgery of transfer can be conscripted to a regular job (or even
overnight if you don't want rapid replies). Think "disc cache".

You either have to like and lump your dialup connection for downloading news
locally (enabling you to use a variety of clients) or you use your dialup
connection to connect to a remote shell and use a CLI-based news client
there (such as slrn or tin; you could use a GUI one but it is not
recommended on a dialup connection unless you're *ed ;0). This is what
I do:

1) use a compressed ssh connection to a remote server (one of my machines
on-campus)
2) Use slrn on that machine
3) connect (at very high bandwidth and low latency) to the local news server
there
4) read and post articles through this

This approach has the advantages of consistent configuration and records of
which articles you have/haven't read (eg I use the same slrn client when
logged in locally on-campus), as well as speedy connection to the news
server. I wait a mere second or two to access the groups. The same for
postings, whilst using the dialup directly it is much more painful if there
are more than a handful of articles.

If your dialup is otherwise quiet (ie someone else isn't browsing the web or
whatever whilst you're using the shell connection, like the selfish and
ignorant swine they are ;0) this is IME the quickest way of reading and
posting news. If you have that external account, of course. Otherwise I'm
sorry, but there isn't any practical way I know of that can transfer usenet
from server to client faster than you're already able (beyond intricate,
convoluted and complicated mechanisms which are far from standard practice
IME and I can only guess vaguely at) and the local client+server approach
merely prevents some of the general thrashing and waiting.

Frink

--
'Professor' J Frink - Ringtail to the Stars & Professional Mossbauer Guru
SciGraphica, Plotting and Analysis: http://www.veryComputer.com/
shrike at cmp dot liv dot ack dot ook
"Don't get mad, get mice!"

Quote:>Unless *I'm* missing something in the nntp protocol it can't make it faster.
>Whether you pull in the news headers or articles via your news client or
>through a news server which downloads and then stores them locally, the same
>amount of information has to be moved from point A to point B using the
>exact same protocol.
>1) use a compressed ssh connection to a remote server (one of my machines
>on-campus)
>2) Use slrn on that machine
>3) connect (at very high bandwidth and low latency) to the local news server
>there
>4) read and post articles through this

Now I want to start playing with running my news client on my home machine
through a dial-up ISP. I regularly get about 44K connection to my ISP. When
I fire up nn it takes 3 minutes before the first article appears. Prior to
playing with nn I played with Pnews so I could post. I found that Pnews
used inews and that whenever I posted an article (to alt.test) it took 3
minutes before the completion message appeared. I nosed around and found
that inews was loading the entire list of news groups (huge file similar
to .newsrc) just so that it could verify that I was posting to a valid
news group. The list of news groups was about 1 Mb. What a waste of
bandwidth. If it were possible to ask the server if, say, alt.test
was a valid news group the entire process would require almost no
bandwidth.

The Pnews farce can be resolved by replacing inews with inews-nntp
in the Pnews script. Now Pnews is immediate.

So, back to nn: my wife uses netscape to read news via a German news
server; there isn't a big delay like I have with nn when she responds
to a post, or switches to a new news group. That tells me that the
server is capable of more intelligent communication.

What I would like to see in a news reader client is quite simple:
1. at startup it looks at .newsrc and sees which news groups
        I want, and what articles I have alread read.
2. For each news group it asks the server what article numbers
        are available.
3. For each article not already read, ask the server to send
        the author/subject lines.
4. Display the author/subject lines for me to select articles.
5. Download the body of each article I selected.
6. Update my .newsrc to reflect the latest list of processed
        articles.

In this reader client I never need the entire list of news groups,
that is the 1Mb file that takes the three minutes between events.

Finally, it is spam that has driven me to abandon the alumni connection.
Every damn time I post I get dozens of long html spam articles. I
am sick of it.

I will check out leafnode.

Thanks again.

Quote:> slrnpull. Pity, slrnpull doesn't listen on a tcp port, it's only for
> Slrn client.

Knews.#spool: knewsd -spool /var/spool/slrnpull/news \
                     -active /var/spool/slrnpull/data/active

The knewsd program came with the knews program.  The other problem was
that knews posted with inews if I remember correctly.  I found an
inews script in a package called PNF (Personal News Fetcher) that I
changed slightly so that slrnpull would post my replys.

I have not used any other news readers besides knews or slrn so I
don't know if something similiar could be used with Netscape (or other
readers) or not.

--
Frank Hahn

You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.

There are a number of news readers that know how to cope with spools,
including:
 - slrn (obviously!)
 - trn
 - strn
 - probably nn and tass
 - Gnus
 - Perhaps surprisingly, MH and Sylpheed (that are usually considered
   mail readers!)

I expect that you need an NNTP server if you're using a Netscape
derived news reader, but take a look-see; there are a number of news
readers that can use slrnpull spools...
--

http://www3.sympatico.ca/cbbrowne/languages.html
"Microsoft is sort of a mixture between the Borg and the
Ferengi. Combine the Borg marketing with Ferengi networking..."
-- Andre Beck in dcouln

I will confess that I am not using a linux nntp server (it's running
on OS/2; I set it up years before I even started with linux and it's
been practically maintenance free since, so I'm reluctant to "fix" it)
but there should be no reason why you can't do the same thing with
linux software.

--