Usenet gateway

THIS THREAD IS CLOSED!
Posts in here will NOT be answered

This hack has undergone many major changes since this thread was started. Consequently, most of the posts have become dated and of little use. To coincide with the latest major release (20010712), a new one has been started.

See this thread for the latest version and discussion

[Sinema]

I installed it exactly how their instructions said and the instructions said that if there were any errors I would see them "loudly"

people can post in the forum , add threads etc.. just nothing from usenet is shown in the folder

[NgtCrwlr]

I forgot to mention the link you posted goes to a blank page so I couldn't see anything.

If you can run newnews.pl from telnet without error and it shows a clean disconnect message from your news server then I'm guessing that you have your forum settings wrong.

Try posting a link that works and we can work from there.

[Sinema]

The cgi-bin server of the place I use is down ..

and also

since it's a free web host .. that allows php and mysql ... I do not have telnet access

I followed their directions exactly as they listed.. and I didn't see any huge errors or anything.. I actually did not see an error at all ..

[Gilby]

Originally posted by Sinema
I followed their directions exactly as they listed.. and I didn't see any huge errors or anything.. I actually did not see an error at all ..

Did you run newnews.pl? This is done from telnet... although, the latest version may be able to be ran from the webbrowser. Can you show us the output of what you get when you run the newnews.pl script?

[Sinema]

Since it's a free webhost ..

The only web host that I know of that is free and supports mysql/php

It doesn't allow telnet connection :-(

so I can't telnet to the script but the instructions didn't say anything about the pl

it said to place it above the wwwroot .. so I placed it right above www in my ftp

[Gilby]

Originally posted by Sinema
it said to place it above the wwwroot .. so I placed it right above www in my ftp

That script is meant to be run as a cronjob and is the script that fetches the postings from the newsgroup. So without running that script, no posts will go to or from the newsgroup.

Since you don't have telnet access, you'll need to put the newnews.pl script in a place where it is visible from the web. Also you will need to add this line near the top of the script:

print "Content-type: text/html\n\n<pre>";

Then run it from your web browser. You'll have to figure out a way to run it periodically too since you don't have access to a cronjob. Maybe there is a service on the internet that will access a certain page every 15 minutes or so and therefore execute the script.

[fastforward]

The newnews.pl was never intended to be executed from the browser. As per section 2 of the instructions:

Upload the newnews.pl script into any directory and chmod 0755 to make it executable. It is recommended that this directory be outside your wwwroot. This script is not designed to be executed as a cgi. It should be executed periodically via cron. Next, upload the usenet.php file into the admin directory of your vB installation. This is the control panel page.

And then towards the bottom under the heading 'Running':

To collect all the historical news on the server you will need to set the 'keep orphan replies' option to an artificially high number to prevent losing posts. Once you have collected all the news, reset the number to somewhere between 2 and 5 days.

Don't worry if when you run it the first few times you see a lot of messages on the screen saying message 'Not Available'. This is because most newservers are inaccurate in their reporting of the first and last article they have available. Just keep running it and you will see articles start to collect eventually. This is only an issue during the initial historical pull.

Once you have the history, you can set up a cron job to run the script every 20 minutes or so.

But that aside... most ISP news accounts authenticate you using an IP address (the IP address of your home PC). Unless the web host has a news server you can use, you will probably need to get a seperate feed.

As for running the newnews.pl from the browser; I believe it has been done successfully, but I have not tested newer versions using this method and make no guarantees that there won't be problems.

NOTE to everyone waiting for the next release:
I've been so so so so busy I haven't made much progress with the binary attachments so the up-coming version will only have the x-noarchive addition plus a few bug fixes. I was able to reproduce the quote color problems. It was a syntax problem that sonehow crept in between versions. Probably a slip on the keyboard

[Sinema]

Wow thank you I didn't even know that

And good point ..

I know where there is a server that allows Telnet and CGI .. etc..

but it doesn't run php or mysql ..

do you think I can use that for anything?

[Gilby]

Originally posted by Sinema
do you think I can use that for anything?

If you can make a cronjob from that account via telnet, then you can run the following command with your crontab file:
wget http://domain.to/your/newnews.pl --output-file=/dev/null

[chrispadfield]

Originally posted by Sinema
Wow thank you I didn't even know that

And good point ..

I know where there is a server that allows Telnet and CGI .. etc..

but it doesn't run php or mysql ..

do you think I can use that for anything?

yes, just run the script on that site and set the database to the one on your other host. That is what is so good about databases, you don't need to run the programs at the same place.